The impact of cultural differences on the success of elite labor migration—Evidence from professional soccer
利用职业足球运动员的详细数据，研究发现文化差异在长期内对员工价值有正面影响，短期内行业领先企业间的迁移也有积极效应，纠正了以往文献中因忽略适应效应而得到的负面结论。
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.