Does exercise participation promote happiness?: Mediations and heterogeneities

Abstract

This paper uses a nationally representative and large-scale dataset from China to empirically examine the relationship between exercise participation and happiness. To address the problem of reverse causality between the two factors, the instrumental variable (IV) approach is used to deal with endogeneity to some extent. It is demonstrated that higher frequencies of exercise participation are positively related to happiness. Findings also demonstrate that physical exercise could significantly decrease depressive disorders, improves self-rated health conditions and reduces the frequency of health problems affecting people's work and life. At the same time, all of above health factors significantly influence subjective wellbeing. When these health variables are included in regressions, the correlation between exercise participation and happiness declines. This confirms that physical activity helps to improve happiness by enhancing mental and overall health conditions. In addition, results show that physical activities are more prominently related to happiness for male, older and unmarried individuals and those living in rural areas, lacking social security and with higher levels of depression as well as lower socioeconomic status. Furthermore, a series of robustness checks are carried out and exercise participation's positive role in improving happiness is further confirmed using different happiness measures and instrumental variables, various IV models, as well as penalized machine learning methods and placebo tests. With the increasing emphasis of improving happiness as an important goal in the global public health policy, findings of this paper have important policy implications for enhancing subjective wellbeing.