Repeated Selection with Heterogenous Individuals and Relative Age Effects

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. In contexts such as education and sports, skill-accumulation of individuals over time crucially depends on the amount of training they receive, which is often allocated on the basis of repeated selection. We analyze optimal selection policies in a model of endogenous skill formation where, apart from their ability to transform training into skills, individuals also differ with respect to relative age. The latter has been identified by recent empirical research as a major determinant for performance differentials within cohorts. We find that the optimal policy is pro-competitive at later selection stages in the sense of selecting the individuals with the higher skill signals. All eventual corrections due to relative age occur at early stages, where selection is either counter-competitive (i.e. individuals with low skill signals are selected) or even avoided at all. Thereby, the induced selection quality is non-monotone in the degree of ex-ante asymmetry due to relative age. Finally, the (empirical) observation of persistent relative age effects does in general not hint at suboptimal selection policies. Terms of use: Documents inJEL-Code: J240, M530, I250, I280.

Born Leaders: Political Selection and The Relative Age Effect in the US Congress

“…Evans et al (2010) showed that those who are young compared with their peers are more likely to receive a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.) Additionally to the human capital formation model by Cunha and Heckman (2007), Dawid and Muehlheusser (2012) provided a theoretical foundation to study the channels through which this effect operates. In their model, ability is imperfectly observed and hence partly confounded with maturity (i.e.…”

“…In this section we try to address this question empirically. An interesting theoretical contribution is Dawid and Muehlheusser (2012). They theoretically studied optimal selection when individuals differ with respect to (partly unobserved) abilities and relative age, which is partly confounded with ability (assuming that ability and date of birth are uncorrelated).…”

“…A given stock of skills facilitates the adoption of more skills-self-productivity-and increases the returns to later investments-complementarity of skills. As a result, relative age might have a long-lasting effect on people and their vocational success; see also Dawid and Muehlheusser (2012).…”