Search results for " Capital"
showing 10 items of 1008 documents
Sheepskin Effects in the Spanish Labour Market: A Public–Private Sector Analysis
2005
ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to contrast the nature of the effect of education, Human Capital or Screening, in the Spanish labour market. We use the Hungerford and Solon methodology to distinguish between the returns to schooling from mere years of schooling as a reflection of their productive–enhancing contribution (human capital) and the returns to schooling from academic certificates as signals of the individual’s ability (sheepskin effects). We separate our data into public and private sector workers. In the public sector the institutional restriction in the access and in the wage settings might force certificate rewards. Those not necessarily should be interpreted as sheepskin eff…
Job Mobility and Sorting: Theory and Evidence
2019
Abstract Motivated by the canonical (random) on-the-job search model, I measure a person’s ability to sort into higher ranked jobs by the risk ratio of job-to-job transitions to transitions into unemployment. I show that this measure possesses various desirable features. Making use of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), I study the relation between human capital and the risk ratio of job-to-job transitions to transitions into unemployment. Formal education tends to be positively associated with this risk ratio. General experience and occupational tenure have a pronounced negative correlation with both job-to-job transitions and transitions into unemployment, leaving the r…
Reassessing segmentation in the Labour Market: an application for Italy 1995-2004.
2011
The aim of this paper is to test for the presence of dualism in a standard wage regression. The disparity in wages between primary and secondary workers, according to labour market segmentation theory, is not provided by worker characteristics, but rather by job characteristics. A standard way to assess this situation is by looking at the estimated coefficients in a standard regression for comparable workers across different labour market segments. In an attempt to avoid arbitrary modelling choices, we deploy mixture regression methods which allow for endogenous determination of the number of existing labour market segments. Using Italian data, our modelling strategy outlines stark differen…
Assessing the performance of the Latin American and Caribbean banking industry: Are domestic and foreign banks so different?
2015
AbstractThis paper studies the relative performance of domestic and foreign banks in the Latin American and Caribbean banking industry. Data Envelopment Analysis is used to compute technical efficiency scores for the years 2001 and 2013. Our main contribution is twofold. On the one hand, we assess performance at the level of the management of specific production factors. On the other hand, we distinguish program efficiency from managerial efficiency, which allows us to evaluate whether the differences in technical efficiency between national and foreign banks are due to the use of different technologies (program efficiency) or, conversely, differences in the managerial capacities of manager…
Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism and the Social Science of Marxian Economics
2018
This article supports claims that critical realism philosophy of science, as refounded in the hands of Roy Bhaskar, offers valuable knowledge enhancing insight into the advancement of Marx’s research program. However, it maintains that key principles set out by Bhaskar have not been adequately assimilated by those working with critical realism in the field of Marxist studies. When they are properly considered, they point to the necessity of reconstructing Marx’s corpus on a divergent basis from the conventional form it has assumed since the codification of “Marxism” by Karl Kautsky in the late nineteenth century as an overarching theory of history or historical materialism, wherein Marx’s e…
The path of R&D efficiency over time
2015
Abstract In this paper we investigate the pattern of R&D efficiency in terms of the number of product innovations achieved by firms over time. Using a panel dataset of Spanish manufacturing firms for the period 1990–2006, we follow the innovative performance of R&D active firms and observe that innovation rates change over firms' R&D histories. To explain these facts we propose a model that explicitly acknowledges the twofold composition of firms' R&D expenditures, comprising spending on both physical capital for R&D projects and payments to researchers. We regard this latter component of R&D as a source for dynamic returns to firms' R&D investments. Consequently firms' innovation outcomes …
In UteroRamadan Exposure and Children's Academic Performance
2014
A large literature has linked the in utero environment to health in adulthood. We consider how prenatal nutrition may shape human capital acquisition in childhood, utilising the month-long Ramadan fast as a natural experiment. In student register data for Pakistani and Bangladeshi families in England, we examine whether Ramadan's overlap with pregnancy affects subsequent academic outcomes at age 7. We find that test scores are 0.05-0.08 standard deviations lower for students exposed to Ramadan in early pregnancy. Our results suggest that brief prenatal investments may be more cost effective than traditional educational interventions in improving academic performance.
Community currency (CCs) in Spain: An empirical study of their social effects
2016
Despite its sudden proliferation along the economic crisis period, no previous study has investigated the social effects of the community currency (CCs) experiences in Spain. Previous research on CCs experiences from different countries provided evidences about social capital improvement, introducing CCs as sustainability tools. This research uses the theoretical frameworks of social capital and complex adaptive systems to approach concepts like sustainability, networks, trust, norms, participation and cooperation. Statistical analysis of the data collected in June 2013 through online survey explores social capital and resilience indicators among the Spanish exchange community users, conclu…
Educational attainment in the OECD, 1960-2010. Updated series and a comparison with other sources
2015
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. This paper describes the construction of updated series on the educational attainment of the adult population for a sample of 22 OECD countries covering the period 1960-2010. These series are then compared with (the OECD subsample of) the latest available version of other cross-country data sets on average years of schooling that are commonly used in the literature. Finally, statistical measures of the information content of the different series are constructed using the procedure developed by Krueger and Lindhal (K&L, 2001) and de la Fuente and Doménech (D&D, 2006). The exercise shows that there are important differences in quality across data sets and suggests that su…
The environmental Kuznets curve within European countries and sectors: greenhouse emission, production function and technology
2018
Based on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis and the technological change and the environment literature, our original contribution consists in analysing within the decomposition model the direct and indirect influence of technological change as well as the energy mix on CO2 emissions. Focusing on the dirtiest sectors of 25 EU countries in the period 1997-2005 and considering the endogeneity issue, we estimate an adjusted EKC relationship comparing a single equation model (univariate model) with a simultaneous equations system (bivariate model). Following Lopez (J Environ Econ Manag 27:163-184, 1994), a second equation is introduced where per capita income is a positive functio…