| 简介： |
As a piece of the Olympic Strategy, the age regulations in the professional soccer in China give the targeted groups, such as the aged 23 in Olympic years, certain advantages in their career development. We use the changes of age limit policies as natural experiments to study the distortion effects of the age regulations on the human capital distribution across age cohorts. To study the effects, we construct a data combing players' performance in professional leagues and national teams, as well as the results of the bone age assessments of young players. Using the data, we find that the targeted groups of the regulations gain higher human capital levels than the others in terms of market values and the performance in professional game. The paper shows that the following responses to the regulations attribute to the distortion effects. First, professional clubs give more opportunities to the young players of the targeted group because of political pressure. Second, the soccer association arranges more games for the targeted group. Third, some players of the untargeted group modified their ages to meet the age requirements of the policies.
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