More goals, fewer babies? On national team performance and birth rates

Abstract

Does national team performance boost birth rates? We compiled a unique dataset combining country-level monthly birth rates for 50 European countries, over 56 years, with measures of national teams’ performance in 27 international football events. We find that an increase in national team performance in international cups is associated with a drop in the birth rate nine months after the event. We hypothesize that these results might be explained by individuals’ time allocation choices.