The impact of foreign expertise on firm productivity: Evidence from the Swedish Hockey League : Investigating the productivity effects in a competitive professionalenvironment covering the years 2000-2025

Sammanfattning

This study examines how the inclusion of foreign expertise influences organizational productivity, using the SHL as a case of a competitive labor market. By treating the teams of SHL as firms, and players as labor, we use a unique panel dataset of historical performance spanning 25 SHL seasons (2000-2025) to assess the impact of foreign players with NHL experience on three key productivity outcomes: total points earned during regular season, top six league placement during regular season, and champion’s title. With the bases of human capital theory and expert theory, we assume that elite foreign expertise brings specialized knowledge and experience that will positively influence team productivity. However, our empirical study shows no statistically significant effect of foreign elite expertise on team productivity in either the OLS or logistic regression models. In contrast, the fixed effects models reveal a statistically significant negative relationship, suggesting that when controlling for unobserved team- and season-specific factors, the inclusion of foreign elite players may be associated with reduced performance of team productivity. These findings suggest that factors such as integration, coordination costs and communication can be considered highly important when investigating whether foreign elite expertise contributes positively to team performance. This study contributes to the existing literature on labor heterogeneity and skill transfer by offering new empirical evidence into the relationship between elite foreign expertise and productivity in high-performance team environments.