Born Leaders: Political Selection and The Relative Age Effect in the US Congress
研究发现美国顶尖政治人物的出生月份分布存在偏差，倾向于那些在班级中年龄较大的个体，并讨论了识别该效应的统计方法，发现相对年龄与当选者质量无关。
Summary We present substantial evidence for the existence of a bias in the distribution of births of leading US politicians in favour of those who were the eldest in their cohort at school. This result adds to the research on the long-term effects of relative age among peers at school. We discuss parametric and non-parametric tests to identify this effect, and we show that it is not driven by measurement error, redshirting or a sorting effect of highly educated parents. The magnitude of the effect that we estimate is larger than what other studies on ‘relative age effects’ have found for broader populations but is in general consistent with research that looks at professional sportsmen. We also find that relative age does not seem to correlate with the quality of elected politicians.