“Technological Change and Obsolete Skills: Evidence from Men’s Professional Tennis”, 2021-09-10 (; similar):
The sudden arrival of composite racquets affected tennis player productivity, entry, and exit.
Young players at the time benefited at the expense of older players.
The empirical patterns are consistent with a model of skill-altering technological change.
Technological innovation can raise the returns to some skills while making others less valuable or even obsolete. [cf. talkies, Adobe Flash]
We study the effects of such skill-altering technological change in the context of men’s professional tennis, which was unexpectedly transformed by the invention of composite racquets during the late 1970s. We explore the consequences of this innovation on player productivity, entry, and exit.
We find that young players benefited at the expense of older players and that the disruptive effects of the new racquets persisted over 2 to 4 generations.
[Keywords: technological change, human capital, tennis]
…At the same time, at least since Ricardo, economists have recognized that innovation can also be disruptive. As 2002 vividly states, “in 19th-century Britain, skilled artisans destroyed weaving, spinning, and threshing machines during the Luddite and Captain Swing riots, in the belief that the new machines would make their skills redundant. They were right: the artisan shop was replaced by the factory and later by interchangeable parts and the assembly line.” New technologies disrupt the labor market when they raise the returns to some skills while making others less valuable or obsolete.
We develop a theory, inspired by Mac2004, of this phenomenon, which we call skill-altering technical change. Our theory emphasizes that workers endogenously invest in a portfolio of skills over their life cycle. We show that new technologies that change the relative values of skills can hurt older workers, who have spent a lifetime investing in the old, ideal skill mix, and better workers, who, by definition, possess more of the skills that were previously more valuable.
…To test our model’s predictions empirically and quantify the effects of skill-altering technical change, we exploit the introduction of composite racquets in men’s professional tennis during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These new racquets drastically changed the way the game was played, increasing the importance of hitting with spin and power relative to control. There are 4 reasons this episode in men’s professional tennis is a useful setting to study the effects of skill-altering technological change on workers. First, we have detailed panel data on multiple cohorts of individual workers (players), allowing us to track the impacts of skill-altering change over multiple generations of workers. Such data is difficult to obtain in most settings. Second, the new technology arrived suddenly and unexpectedly and was adopted universally within a few years.
…Until the mid-1970s, tennis racquets were made nearly exclusively of wood, and this technology had been stable for decades. Although alternative materials were tried, such as the steel Wilson T-2000, which a few players used, most players continued to play with wood racquets. Then a retired engineer, Howard Head, started playing tennis and discovered he was terrible at the game. He decided that the fault lay with his racquet, and in 1976, he took it upon himself to invent a new one, the Prince Classic. “With…my racket I was inventing not to just make money, but to help me.”2
Although initial reactions to Head’s new racquet were laughter and scorn, the racquet had much to offer recreational players.3 The Prince Classic had a larger string bed and sweet spot that made it easier for players to make good contact with the ball and generate more power and spin, but it achieved these gains at the expense of stiffness and control, making the racquet unacceptable for professional players. Racquet makers quickly found a solution; they developed methods for constructing the racquet frame out of a composite material consisting of a mixture of carbon fibers and resin. Composite frames allowed both a larger string bed and a stiff frame, giving players more power and control. The first composite racquet that professionals used, the Prince Pro, hit the market in 1978, and composite racquets quickly replaced wood ones as professional players found that their familiar wood racquets were no match for the combination of power and control afforded by the new composite racquets.
…by 1984, composite racquets had taken over the tour. The introduction of composite racquets substantially changed the way men’s professional tennis was played. When tennis players strike the ball, they often try to impart topspin…Although composite racquets allow players to generate much more topspin and power, taking full advantage of this potential required large changes to players’ strokes and play style. Older players in particular, who had invested years in learning to play with a wood racquet, faced the daunting challenge of adjusting to composite racquets. Players began altering their stances and swings to generate more topspin and power. They rotated their grips to generate more spin and help them return balls that were bouncing higher because of the increased topspin of their opponents. These seemingly subtle changes in technique and strategy resulted in a much more physical and faster-paced game. As Cross observed,
The modern game of tennis is played at a furious pace compared with the old days when everyone used wood racquets. Just watch old film from the 1950s and you will see that the game is vastly different. Ken Rosewall and Lew Hoad barely broke into a sweat. Today’s game has players grunting and screaming on every shot, calling for the towel every third shot, and launching themselves off the court with the ferocity of their strokes.
…We find that the introduction of the new composite racquets substantially disrupted the tour, with repercussions lasting for between 2 and 4 generations. It temporarily reduced the rank correlation in player quality over time, helped younger players at the expense of older ones, reduced the average age of tennis players, and increased exit rates of older players relative to younger ones. We find that inter-generational inequality rose, though we find mixed evidence for the new racquets’ effects on cross-sectional inequality. We also consider competing explanations, but we conclude that they cannot explain many of the other patterns we find. Moreover, when we compare the ages of tennis players with other Olympic athletes, we do not find a similar drop in the ages of Olympic athletes during the same time period.
See Also: