Baseball and life expectancy: evidence from linked historical data (with Joseph Price and Jacob Van Leeuwen)
Recommended citation: Price, Joseph, Sebastian Brown, and Jacob Van Leeuwen. "Chapter 8: Baseball and life expectancy: evidence from linked historical data." In Historical Perspectives on Sports Economics: Lessons from the Field. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788977845. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788977845.00015
We construct a new dataset that links information on professional baseball players with genealogical information about their family members. Our sample includes 4,091 major league players born before 1940 along with 8,344 of their siblings. We find that MLB players live about 3 years longer than their siblings. In order to examine how much of this difference is due to a possible income effect, we also construct a sample of 6,134 minor league players (who never made it to the majors) and 9,245 of their siblings. We find an even larger gap for the minor league players with them living about 4.1 years longer than their siblings. The dataset that we’ve constructed provides a unique way to incorporate information from census and vital records to expand the types of measures that we have about professional athletes.