Leader age at accession and economic growth: Evidence from tenure-aligned event windows (1995–2018)

Using 444 leader spells in 158 countries over 1995–2018, this paper examines whether leaders who enter office at older ages are followed by lower real GDP-per-capita growth. Growth is measured relative to world growth and, in the main design, only during years in which the accession leader remains in office. The unconditional age-growth relationship is negative, but it weakens once comparisons are made within countries and accession years and once pre-accession growth, initial income, demographics, internet use, and observed post-window length are included. At the three-year horizon, a 10-year higher accession age is associated with about 0.27 percentage points lower annual growth in the baseline specification, but the estimate becomes close to zero among spells with a fully observed three-year post-accession window. At five years, the estimate is small and statistically fragile. Heterogeneity evidence is suggestive rather than decisive: age gradients are more negative in autocracies, low-polyarchy settings, and high-digital-repression settings, while democracies exhibit near-zero gradients, but interaction estimates are imprecise. Placebo tests show little systematic relation between accession age and pre-accession growth. Overall, the evidence is descriptive and points less to a general age penalty than to the importance of transition stability, executive constraints, and institutional environments.