Does It Pay to Play? An Analysis of the Impact of High School Athletic Participation on Post-School Wages

Is athletics a wage-enhancing activity? Utilizing the human capital and signaling theories, this study hypothesizes that athletics is a wage-enhancing activity. An econometric analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Education Study of 1988 provides significant empirical evidence to support this hypothesis, yet finds little evidence to support the hypothesis that the wage premium is different across various occupations. This study implements both the Ordinary Least Squares and Two-stage Least Squares regression techniques to estimate the impact of athletic participation on future wages. The study also finds evidence that the wage impacts of participation in individual and team sports are indistinguishable. This disaggregated examination of the impact of athletic participation on wage expands on the previous literature and provides a new area of the research for future studies to analyze