The effect of age on productivity of runners: A panel data estimation

There seems to be an agreement among economists about a worldwide slowdown in productivity of workers. In the United States, for example, non-farm business productivity growth averaged 2.6% in the 1995-2010 period and, thereafter, it declined to only about 0.4% in the 2010-2015 periods (Blinder, 2015). A number of authors have suggested that the decline in worker’s productivity might be related to difficulty measuring recent technological products and services in the National Accounts Statistics; in other words, the productivity slowdown is attributed to a statistical illusion. Also, there is evidence indicating that the business sector might be losing dynamism as well as is reallocating labor across regions and countries at a lower rate than it used to years ago, which might explain the drop in worker’s productivity (Haltiwanger 2014, 2015). In spite of the dramatic change of the last two decades in the age distribution of workers in the developed world, however, there are not many studies relating the decline in worker’s productivity to the aging population. In this paper, I try to fill this gap. This paper uses an unbalanced panel data set, spanning the years from 2005 to 2014, of runners for the 21K Hispaniola Half Marathon Race, to analyze the impact of age on productivity performance. We control for a number of factors that affect performance in marathon races, including heat, humidity and weather conditions and distinguish the impact of age on productivity across men and women of different ages. Unlike other studies, we expect that following individual performance over time plus controlling for exogenous factors that affect running performance, we can better assess the impact of age on individual’s productivity. Keywords: Worker Productivity, Race Performance, Marathon Races. JEL Classification: Z22, D24, C14