The age-performance profile of professional and recreational marathon runners

The relationship between age and productivity/performance has for decades been a matter of policy concern. However, given the massive demographic changes that most industrialized societies are confronted with over the next decades (United Nations 2013), this question needs to be addressed again, for example to design adequate pension policies because "policies on aging should take into account physical deterioration rates" (Fair 1994: 117). While early studies (e.g. Breen and Spaeth 1960; Dennis 1956; Meltzer 1949; Zuckerman 1967) have used rather small samples of either bluecollar workers or researchers to identify the age-performance gradient, more recent studies are based on large samples with detailed information on homogeneous groups of workers such as American farmers (Tauer 1995), Belgian, Canadian, and Dutch manufacturing workers (Cataldi et al. 2011; Dostie 2011; Lallemand and Rycx 2009; van Ours and Stoeldraijer 2011), and German automobile workers (Börsch-Supan and Weiss 2016). Moreover, particular groups of either artists (e.g. British novelists [Crozier 1999] and American contemporary painters [Galenson and Weinberg 2000]) or American physicists and earth scientists (Levin and Stephan 1991), psychologists (Horner et al. 1986), chemists, geologists, mathematicians, and sociologists (Cole 1979), and economists (Oster and Hamermesh 1998) as well as Australian judges (Smyth and Bhattacharya 2003) have been studied to identify an occupation-specific age-performance relationship.