Childhood obesity is one of the most serious public health challenges of the 21st century. While small-scale experiments change behaviors among adults in the short run, we know little about the effectiveness of large-scale policies or the longer-run impacts.
To nudge primary school children into a long-term habit of exercising, the German state of Saxony distributed sports club membership vouchers among all 33,000 third graders in 2009. In 2018, we carried out a population register-based survey to evaluate the policy.
Even after a decade, awareness of the voucher program was statistically-significantly higher in the treatment group. We also find that youth received and redeemed the vouchers. However, we do not find statistically-significant short-term or long-term effects on sports club membership, physical activity, overweightness, or motor skills.
Apparently, membership vouchers for children are not a strong enough policy tool to overcome barriers to exercise regularly.
Figure 1: Development of Outcome Variables in Treatment and Control States across Cohorts. Notes: The figure displays unadjusted trends of the main outcome variables by the school year in which YOLO respondents attended the third grade, before and after the start of the C2SC initiative. The treatment state is Saxony and control states are Brandenburg and Thuringia. n = 13,334.