"Academic Age" of Authors of American Economic Review Articles

Torgler and Piatti have written a massive paper on the American Economic Review with heaps of tables, graphs, and regression analyses. This is what most caught my eye:



Academic age is the number of years since an author got their PhD. The modal author of an AER article is about 4 years post PhD and there's quite a low probability of publication more than 20 years post-PhD. Maybe this is why people like to hire new PhDs... These results didn't hold up for the superstar authors who published large numbers of AER articles. They published their papers fairly consistently across their career rather than a bunch at the beginning.