In response to declining budgets, many school districts in the US have reduced funding for sports. In Europe, parents may respond to difficult economic times by spending less on sports clubs for their children. Such cuts are unwise if participating in sports is an investment good as well as a...

A productive workforce is a key objective of public economic policy. Recent empirical work suggests that increasing individual participation in sports and exercise can be a major force for achieving this goal. The productivity gains and related increase in earnings come on top of the already...

Based on a unique composite dataset measuring heterogeneous sports participation, labour market outcomes and local facilities provision, this paper examines for the first time the association between different types of sports participation on employment and earnings in England. Clear...

A growing body of research suggests that, even after controlling for cognitive abilities, personality predicts economic success in later life. The learning environment at school focuses on knowledge and cognitive skills. The transmission of character skills, however, is not at the center of...

Peacetime military service has both positive and negative effects on human capital. While it depreciates academic abilities it also enhances non-cognitive skills. The net effect of conscription is hard to identify due to issues of self-selection, endogenous timing and omitted variables bias. We...

This paper examines the effects of a massive salt iodization program on human capital formation of school-aged children in China. Exploiting province and time variation, we find a strong positive impact on cognition for girls and no effects for boys. For non-cognitive skills, we find the...

This paper examines the effects of a massive salt iodization program on human capital formation of school-aged children in China. Exploiting province and time variation we find strong positive effects on cognition for girls and no effects for boys. For non-cognitive skills we find the opposite....

This empirical paper analyzes labor market sorting across establishments using Swedish register data on cognitive and non-cognitive abilities. We draw on the theoretical foundations of Chone' and Kramarz (2021), in which workers are endowed with sets of multidimensional skills that need to be...

We examine the extent to which participation in high school athletics has beneficial effects on future education, labor market, and health outcomes. Due to the absence of plausible instruments in observational data, we use recently developed methods that relate selection on observables with...

Internal communication has become an important factor in today's business world. The increased use of electronic media can, despite their obvious advantages, cause communication problems, i.e. information overload. By avoiding communication problems, the productivity of a company can be...