The Effects of Coworker Heterogeneity on Firm-Level Output: Assessing the Impacts of Cultural and Language Diversity in the National Hockey League

Leo Kahane (), Neil Longley and Robert Simmons
Additional contact information
Neil Longley: University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Robert Simmons: Lancaster University Management School

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2013, vol. 95, issue 1, 302-314

Abstract: This paper uses data from the National Hockey League (NHL) to consider the potential gains to firms from employing culturally diverse work teams. It finds that the presence of foreign workers does increase firm-level performance: NHL teams that employed a higher proportion of European players performed better. However, the results also indicate that teams perform better when their European players come from the same country rather than being spread across many European countries. When teams have players from a wide array of European countries, integration costs associated with language and cultural differences may start to override any gains from diversity. © 2013 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: workplace diversity; heterogeneity; cultural diversity; language diversity; National Hockey League (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (86)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00221 link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Effects of Coworker Heterogeneity on Firm-Level Output: Assessing the Impacts of Cultural and Language Diversity in the National Hockey League (2009)
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:tpr:restat:v:95:y:2013:i:1:p:302-314

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().