TY  - JOUR
AB  - Purpose Talent compression is the labor market phenomenon where the average productivity differential between participants declines and has been used to explain the overall increase in competition within some professional sports markets. A finding that competitiveness is uniquely driven by talent compression is consistent with Rottenberg (1956), who argued that resource distribution is independent of factors that are invariant to labor productivity.Design/methodology/approach Rather than incorporate MLB team roster turnover as many of the past studies have done, we prefer to measure of all-star turnover in membership. Problematically, movement from an MLB team to an MLB team is limited by rule, finances and the fact that there are very few teams competing for player services. In contrast, All-Star membership is typically costlessly chosen by many millions of fans, league players and managers. In this way, All-Star voting should be invariant to many of the factors that affect movement from an MLB team to an MLB team.Findings In the end, we find that a close association between all-star turnover rates and the makeup of MLB’s labor pool.Originality/value The paper offers a new measure of player mobility.
VL  - 48
IS  - 1
SN  - 0144-3585
DO  - 10.1108/JES-01-2020-0043
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/JES-01-2020-0043
AU  - Schmidt Martin B.
PY  - 2020
Y1  - 2020/01/01
TI  - Labor demographics and productivity: all-star roster turnover and foreigners
T2  - Journal of Economic Studies
PB  - Emerald Publishing Limited
SP  - 243
EP  - 254
Y2  - 2024/09/22
ER  -