What makes a leader? Relative age and high school leadership

Economists have identified a substantial adult wage premium attached to high school leadership activity. Unresolved is the extent to which it constitutes human capital acquisition or proxies for an “innate” unobserved skill. We document a determinant of high school leadership activity that is associated purely with school structure, rather than genetics or family background – a student's relative age. State-specific school entry cut-offs induce systematic within grade variation in student maturity, which in turn generates differences in leadership activity. We find that the relatively oldest students are 4–11 percent more likely to be high school leaders.