Sports and Happiness in South Africa: Evidence from a Quantile Regression Approach

We analyze the effects of wins and losses of men's and women's cricket, football and rugby teams using a real-time happiness measure derived from tweets over the daily period from January 2020 to June 2023. To prevent omitted-variable bias, we control for a wide range of high-frequency macroeconomic and financial variables. While our primary focus is on South Africa, we compare the results with Australia and New Zealand, where these three sports are equally popular. We use a quantile regression approach to examine the effects of wins and losses across the entire conditional distribution of happiness rather than only at the conditional mean. We find little evidence that wins or losses affect happiness in Australia or New Zealand. In contrast, combined wins across the three sports are associated with statistically significant increases in happiness in South Africa, particularly across the moderately low to high quantiles. While outcomes differ across sports, we do find commonalities across the three countries. Fridays and holidays significantly increase happiness across the entire conditional distributions, whereas new confirmed coronavirus cases and financial market uncertainties negatively impact happiness at certain parts of the conditional distributions.