I have lived in four countries: South Africa, where I grew up, the US, where I was a teenage exchange student, Greece, where I learnt how to be a journalist, and the UK or, more specifically, London, where I have now spent the majority of my life.

Each of those places changed me, but did they make me more self-aware? Did they give me a better understanding of my values and how they interacted with the culture surrounding me? And does that make me a better, more insightful employee than colleagues who stayed in the same place?

A group of academics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rice, North Carolina and Columbia universities conducted a range of studies on whether being an expatriate gave people greater personal insight and concluded that it depended on what sort of expatriate they were.