Impact of importing foreign talent on performance levels of local co-workers

When skilled labour is imported to work in a creative industry, local workers may benefit, in terms of their own level of skill, through contact with new techniques and practices. European basketball offers an opportunity to investigate the reality of this general claim. For a panel of 47 European countries observed over more than twenty years, we model probability of qualification for, and subsequent performance in, Olympic Tournaments and World and European Championships. We demonstrate that, consistent with the spillover hypothesis, an increase in the number of foreigners in a domestic league tends to generate a subsequent improvement in the performance of the national team (which has to be comprised only of local players).

Research Highlights► We test whether domestic workers learn new skills from immigrant colleagues. ► We link national team basketball results to numbers of foreigners in domestic clubs. ► Greater openness to migrants appears to raise performance levels in the national team. ► This supports the spillover hypothesis from labour economics.