Birthplace diversity and team performance

Enzo Brox and Tommy Krieger

No 19-020, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: We present a simple model to illustrate how birthplace diversity may affect team performance. The model assumes that birthplace diversity increases the stock of available knowledge due to skill complementarities and decreases effciency due to communication barriers. The consequence of these two opposing effects is a humpshaped relationship between birthplace diversity and team performance. To verify this prediction, we exploit self-collected data on the first division of German male soccer. Our data set covers 7,028 matches and includes information about 3,266 players coming from 98 countries. We propose two different instrumental variable approaches to identify the effect of birthplace diversity on team performance. Our findings suggest that an intermediate level of birthplace diversity maximizes team performance.

Keywords: birthplace diversity; firm performance; globalization; high-skilled migration; international migration; productivity; soccer; team composition; team performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F23 F66 J01 J24 M14 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-hrm, nep-mig, nep-spo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:19020

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