International Assortative Matching in the European Labor Market

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• Department of Economics

We investigate whether national borders within Europe hinder the assortative matching of workers to firms in a high skilled labor market. Our data sample tracks around 700 football managers (workers) employed by over 300 clubs (firms) across seven countries. We characterize worker productivity as the ability to contribute to physical output (sporting results) and firm productivity as the capacity to transform physical output into revenues. We rank workers and firms according to their individual productivity estimates and study the ensuing rank correlation to gauge the degree of assortative matching within and across countries. We find strong evidence for positive assortative matching at the national level, and even more so at the international level. This suggests national borders do not prevent workers and firm from pursuing profitable complementarities in production.

Co-author: Thomas Peeters

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