Economics

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FIBA Rankings and International Basketball Competitions: Does NBA Experience Matter?
(2012) Ahn, Andrew; Jilani, Saleha
Basketball has increasingly become a global sport. Recent trends have pointed to a large influx of foreign players in the NBA. This paper explores the impact foreign basketball players who play in the NBA have on their home country’s performance during international competition. Utilizing FIBA rankings to measure international performance, I use ordinary least squares (OLS) and fixed effects regression to analyze the performance of 30 countries for a 22-year period, between 1989-2011. The results show that the number of foreign players a country sends to NBA has both statistical and economic significance. Under OLS regressions, NBA experience, hosting major competitions, and country-specific variables were significant and had positive effect on FIBA Rankings. These findings were the same controlling for time trends. Under fixed effects analysis, our experience variables became insignificant while the number of foreign players remained a significant factor, suggesting that not only the quality but also quantity of players a country has is important for performing well during major international competitions such as the Olympics.