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We study the effect of top marginal tax rates on turnover and migration patterns of football players in 19 countries between 2006 and 2016. This phenomenon is analyzed both at the international and inter-regional level by exploiting national and regional variation of the effective marginal tax rate. We estimate two-sided matching model using a maximum score matching approach. This allows us to account for the competition on each side of the market, and get rid of factors affecting both the demand and supply side for which information is hardly available (namely, wages of top-level workers). The structural parameters of the underlying decision process are exploited to quantify the sensitivity of tax payers to taxation, the existence of sorting effects and the heterogeneity of these effects based on the ability of the player. Our results suggest that, once controlling for the matching structure and the observed dimension of the market, the estimates of taxpayers' sensitivity to taxation is lower than the ones presented in the previous literature. The elasticity of migration relative to the net-of-tax rate is 0.04 for natives and 0.80 for foreigners in the top 10% of the quality distribution while is around 0 if we consider all the population. However, the results suggest that lower taxes rates can increase the average quality of the country attracting more high-ability players who displace medium and low-quality players.
