The impact of cultural differences on the success of elite labor migration—Evidence from professional soccer

Joost Bosker () and Marc Gürtler ()
Additional contact information
Joost Bosker: Braunschweig Institute of Technology
Marc Gürtler: Braunschweig Institute of Technology

Annals of Operations Research, 2024, vol. 341, issue 2, No 3, 824 pages

Abstract: Abstract The literature finds that cultural differences have a negative impact on the success of international labor migration. However, modeling cultural effects requires a variety of individual-level, firm-level and country-level data that are not sufficiently considered in the literature. Precisely, previous migration experiences are not taken into account and the culture effect is not isolated from adaptation effects that occur with any change of employer. We find that an identified culture effect is biased if such data are not considered. To take these aspects into account, we utilize soccer data with its abundance of single player information and leverage the approaches established in Operations Research to model soccer player performance. To this end, we extend a prominent mixed-effects model to fit the case of international migration and find contrary results compared to the literature: cultural differences positively affect employee value in the long term and we identify a distinct and positive culture effect in the short run for switches between industry-leading firms. Finally, we show that our results are not driven by peculiarities of soccer player data by using a reduced model without isolating general adaptation difficulties from cultural differences. In this (too) simple model, in accordance with the literature, the biased negative culture effect emerges.

Keywords: Cultural distance; Culture effect; Employee evaluation; International migration; Mixed-effects model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J61 Z22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10479-024-06200-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:annopr:v:341:y:2024:i:2:d:10.1007_s10479-024-06200-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10479

DOI: 10.1007/s10479-024-06200-4

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Operations Research is currently edited by Endre Boros

More articles in Annals of Operations Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().