Abstract
Children born just before the cutoff date for age grouping in youth sport programs suffer from being promoted to higher age groups earlier than their later born peers. Skewed birth month distributions among participants in youth sport and professional sport leagues have been interpreted as the result of this relative age disadvantage. We investigate whether this disadvantage in youth will linger on to their later lives by focusing on the profiles of Japanese corporate executives. Contrary to the previous literature might imply, the early born children seem to show the competitive edge against the late born cohort in the Japanese firms. The birth month distribution among corporate executives is skewed toward early born children after controlling for the uneven distribution of the population birth month.
