Crime and sport participation: Evidence from Italian regions over the period 1997–2003

Abstract

What is the impact of sport participation on society? This paper is tackling this point by studying whether or not there is a relationship between sport participation and crime. A panel dataset have been constructed for the twenty Italian regions over the period 1997–2003. Results show that: (i) there is a robust negative association between sport participation and property crime; (ii) there is a robust negative association between sport participation and juvenile crime; (iii) there is a positive association between sport participation and violent crime, but it is only weakly significant. Interestingly, there is a complementary effect between education and sport participation on crime.