The Productivity Returns to the Global Search for Talent Evidence from Major League Baseball play-by-play data

While the United States labor civilian labor force is nearly twenty percent foreign-born, the percentage of foreigners in most professional sports labor markets is closer to thirty percent. Moreover, the foreign percent in these markets has nearly tripled over the past forty years. Traditional studies into the foreign-born`s impact on professional sports markets have typically used measures of the foreign-born that do not take into account their usage, both in terms of rate and of positions, possibly introducing a degree of sample bias. We use Major league Baseball event, i.e., play-by-play, data and measure the foreign component `one the field` for any given event. This usage measure indicates that the foreign-born, in terms of direct impact, are considerably larger than indicated by other measures. We, further, incorporate a simple and direct measure of productivity - the ability to record an out - and examine the foreign component's impact on this measure. In the end, we find that the impact of the foreign-born was disparate among positions with much of the gains focused on defensive positional players. Also, the impact of the foreign-born on two specific positions - pitching and hitting - was either non-existent, small or in the opposite direction than might be predicted. However, any positive impact of country of origin diversity had largely dissipated by the turn of the twenty-first century.