Does diversity in the payroll affect soccer teams’ performance? Evidence from the Italian Serie A

Caruso, Raul and Carlo, Bellavite Pellegrini and Marco, Di Domizio (2016): Does diversity in the payroll affect soccer teams’ performance? Evidence from the Italian Serie A.

Abstract

This paper empirically investigates the impact of diversity in wage levels of players on seasonal performances of teams in the top Italian soccer league, namely the Serie A . We explore the payroll of 32 professional football teams in the Italian Serie A to compute three measures of diversity and concentration in wage levels, namely the Gini, the Shannon and the Simpson indexes from season 2007/08 to 2015/16. We use the percentage of points achieved by teams as dependent variable, and then we employ panel data techniques estimating random and fixed effect models. We find that only the Simpson index is significantly associated with sport performance. In particular, it appears that sport performance improves as diversity in payroll decreases.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: diversity in wage level, inequality, payroll and sport performance, Italian serie A
• Subjects: L - Industrial Organization > L8 - Industry Studies: Services > L83 - Sports ; Gambling ; Restaurants ; Recreation ; Tourism; M - Business Administration and Business Economics ; Marketing ; Accounting ; Personnel Economics > M5 - Personnel Economics > M52 - Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects; Z - Other Special Topics > Z1 - Cultural Economics ; Economic Sociology ; Economic Anthropology

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