Hurdles for sports consumption? The determining factors of household sports expenditures

Highlights

•	The household production theory performs well in explaining sports consumption.
•	Two-stage approaches are needed to analyze household sports consumption.
•	Higher educated households more often spend money on sports participation.
•	Higher educated households do not spend higher amounts of money on sports.
•	Other influencing factors are family income and sports club membership.

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore the determining factors of household expenditures on sports participation. Due to a relatively large amount of zero-expenditures, simple regression methods are not suited. Because of methodological reasons, the two-step Heckman approach is used over the Tobit approach and the Double Hurdle approach. The participation decision (spend money or not) is influenced by sports participation of the parents, family income, education, sports club membership, and sports frequency. Determining factors of the intensity decision (amount of money that is spent on sports participation) are family income, sports participation of parents during their youth, sports club membership, sports frequency, age of youngest child, and household size. Moreover, the results indicate that a two-stage approach is needed because it gives a more in-depth insight in the household spending behavior. For example, higher educated households more often spend money on sports participation. However, this research demonstrates that once higher educated households have decided to spend money on sports participation, the amount of money spent does not differ from lower educated households.

Keywords:

• Household expenditures
• Two-step Heckman
• Determinants
• Sports participation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Master degree English language Astrid Thibaut, for her rereading and final corrections.

Notes

1 Flanders is the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. Policy of sports is attributed to the three communities of Belgium, of which Flanders is the major one.

Erik Thibaut is PhD student at the Policy in Sports and Physical Activity Research Group at the University of Leuven (Belgium). His field of interest is sport management and sports economics, both with regard to sports participation.

Steven Vos is researcher at the Policy in Sports & Physical Activity Research Group, University of Leuven (Belgium) and is Professor at the School of Sport Studies, Fontys University of Applied Sciences (The Netherlands). His main areas of research are policy and management in Sports & Physical Activity, and supply and demand of grassroots sport.

Jeroen Scheerder (PhD) is Associate Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and head of the Policy in Sport & Physical Activity Research Group at the University of Leuven (Belgium). He lectures in the fields of public sport policy and public sports management. His research focuses on policy-related and socio-economic aspects of sport and leisure-time physical activity. He is a guest professor at the universities of Brussels, Cassino, Cologne, Jyväskylä, Kaunas and Porto, and was a visiting professor of sport sociology at the Faculty of Political & Social Sciences, Ghent University (2005–2007).