Childhood Sporting Experience and Charitable Donations to Disaster Victims

Abstract

I investigated how people’s childhood experiences of involvement in team sports helped them develop non-cognitive skills, which later prompted them to make charitable donations to disaster victims. I independently collected individual-level data from approximately 7000 observations in 2016. The instrumental variable (IV) method was used for the estimations. In the specification of the IV model, sporting experience and informal education in childhood were used as exogenous IV. I found that (1) sporting experiences cause people to have positive subjective views of reciprocity, (2) team sports experience has a larger effect on people than individual sports experience, and (3) the above lead people to donate to disaster victims of enormous disasters such as the Great East Japan Earthquake.