Selection Bias and Peer Effects in Team Sports
By John Ashworth, Bruno Heyndels. 2007
123 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article analyzes how age grouping in youth competitions and soccer education programs affects wage formation at the professional level. A simple theoretical model shows that professional players born late after the cutoff date are expected to earn systematically higher wages than their early-born peers. Two discriminating factors are responsible for this: a systematic bias in the talent detection system and peer effects in the production process of human (sports) capital. The authors demonstrate the existence of such an effect among (native) German professional soccer players. Estimating an earnings function for players in the 1997-1998 and 1998-1999 seasons, the authors find clear evidence of a month-of-birth-related wage bias. Players born late after the cutoff date earn systematically higher wages, though this effect is not discernible in all positions; it is strongest for goalkeepers and defenders but not evident for forwards.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/941af37d8df0779f8acc76c495cc967ca59f9a06
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- The rise of the underdog? The relative age effect reversal among Canadian-born NHL hockey players: A reply to Nolan and Howell (2012, background): “Malcolm Gladwell’s Iron Law of Canadian Hockey – citing the work of Barnsley et al. (1985) – states that birth months are destiny.”