Documents human capital 285 results

"Schooling decisions have a complex nature. Building on the theoretical predictions of the human capital investment model and on previous evidence, we study the relationship between prevailing labour market conditions and schooling decisions in three European countries: Italy, Germany and the UK. The paper contributes to the existing literature by explicitly modelling the role of home ownership in affecting the response to incentives coming from the labour market. The analysis shows that labour market conditions significantly influence the choice of post compulsory secondary education in Italy and the UK, but responses to such incentives are heterogeneous with respect to housing tenure. In Germany, labour markets do not affect the choice of the secondary school track, while they have a significant impact on the transition to tertiary education. As the educational decisions of young people are responsive to changes in the expected gains from education, and bearing in mind the education related goals set by the EU 2020 agenda, policies aimed at raising levels of human capital within the EU should aim at making education a profitable investment."

"This study aims at exploring whether host-country immigration policies related to the selection of immigrants with regard to human capital and other characteristics relevant for the labour market are effective and result in these immigrants' more favourable economic integration. The focus in on immigration policies in two groups of countries. We compare liberal regimes (Ireland and the UK) which policies aimed at attracting highly-skilled immigrants to meet these countries' economic needs in highly-skilled jobs with those of Southern European countries (Italy, Spain and Greece), which pursued more lax and unselective policies, trying to attract labour force for low-skilled jobs in their countries' economies. Economic immigrants are expected to have favourable employment entry chances in each group of countries, not least due to the fact that the supply of immigrants apparently met the labour demand in host countries' economies. We also expect that more selective policies attracting better-qualified immigrants in Ireland and the UK would lead to these immigrants' better chances of higher-quality employment."

"Human capital investments increase lifetime income, but may involve substantial risk. In this paper we use a Finnish panel spanning 22 years to nonparametrically predict the mean, the variance and the skew of the present value of lifetime income, and to calculate certainty equivalent lifetime income at different levels of education. We find that university education is associated with about a half a million euro increase in discounted lifetime disposable income compared to vocational high school. Accounting for risk does little to change this picture. By contrast, vocational high school is associated with only moderately higher lifetime income compared to compulsory education, and the entire difference is due to differential nonemployment."

"In the past decades, behavioral economics has become an influential and important field of economics. Interest in behavioral economics derives from unease with standard economic models that are based on restrictive assumptions, which confine the nature of human motivation. Although Adam Smith, the founding father of modern economics, had highlighted the multitude of psychological motives that drive human behavior, and despite the fact that many influential economists thereafter believed in tenets of modern behavioral economics, the homo economicus assumption became prevalent, until this construct was challenged by compelling evidence on social, cognitive and emotional factors that drive decision-making and social interaction. Since human interaction is germane to labor markets, one would expect behavioral economics to be highly relevant for labor economics. This paper gauges whether and how behavioral economics has left its mark on labor economics, considers the timing and structure of this development, and contemplates its future impact on labor economics."

"his paper proposes a semi-parametric procedure to determine the contribution of human capital variables in explaining the changes of U.S. wage distribution function over the period of 1990–2000. The effects of these factors are estimated by using the Chamberlain's two stage Box–Cox quantile regression approach. One of the main contributions of this paper is that it relaxes the linearity assumption of the conditional quantile function to estimate the counterfactual wage distribution function consistently. This paper also shows that the proposed method provides better estimates of capturing the effects of human capital variables in the two tails of the wage distribution while the results of other parts of the distribution are comparable with the estimates of the previous study which used the linear quantile regression approach. To summarize, these results suggest that this proposed approach is more applicable in cases where the behavior of the tails of the distribution bear much importance."

"We analyze the impact of human capital formation through migration on performance by studying the impact of football players' migration to foreign clubs on their origin countries' international football performance. In our model, migration to foreign clubs allows players to improve their skills. Its impact on national team performance is positive and increasing with the difference in quality between foreign and home country clubs. To test this prediction, we have collected information on the club of employment of national team players for most countries in the world. We have constructed an original migration index, weighing each emigrant player by the quality of the foreign club employing him. We find strong and robust support for the theoretical prediction that migration of national team players improves international football performance, particularly for countries with lower quality football clubs."

"In this paper, we generalize the study of the return to education undertaken in e.g. Laing et al. (1995) and Burdett and Smith (2002) to an environment where the link between education and job destruction is taken into account. This enables us to study how a European-type Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) with heavily regulated long-term contracts and more flexible short-term contracts affects the return to schooling, equilibrium unemployment and welfare. In this context, we show that firing costs and temporary employment have opposite effects on the rate of use of human capital and thus, on educational investments. We furthermore demonstrate that a laissez-faire economy with no regulation is inefficient as it is characterized by insufficient educational investments leading to excess job destruction and inadequate job creation. By stabilizing employment, firing costs could spur educational investments and therefore lead to gains in welfare and productivity, though a first-best policy would be to subsidize education. However, there is little chance that a rise in firing costs in a dual (European-type) EPL context would raise the incentives to schooling and aggregate welfare."