Born Out-of-Season: Talent Allocation and Economic Conditions

This paper studies how regional economic conditions, birth timing, and institutional rules shape talent allocation into high-risk/high-reward payoff structure occupations. Using rich data on English-born professional footballers and exploiting exogenous variation from European Structural Funds in the United Kingdom (1990–2000), we show that improved local conditions reduced the share of summer-born children, who are disadvantaged by age-based cutoffs in youth academies but exhibit higher underlying talent. Although regional income per capita did not significantly change, fertility timing shifted, shrinking this high-potential group: players born after the intervention exhibit lower peak market values, reflecting how economic and institutional factors can misallocate talent.