How Important Is Human Capital for Development? Evidence from Immigrant Earnings

2002 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 198-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lutz Hendricks
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
Physical Capital ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
Output Gap ◽  
Capital Account ◽  
Income Differences ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
New Evidence

This paper offers new evidence on the sources of cross-country income differences. It exploits the idea that observing immigrant workers from different countries in the same labor market provides an opportunity to estimate their human-capital endowments. These estimates suggest that human and physical capital account for only a fraction of cross-country income differences. For countries below 40 percent of U.S. output per worker, less than half of the output gap relative to the United States is attributed to human and physical capital.

scholarly journals Early Childhood Human Capital and Development

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 145-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Schoellman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
Early Childhood ◽  
Standard Model ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Early Childhood Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Childhood Development ◽  
Income Differences ◽  
Cross Country

A growing literature stresses the importance of early childhood human capital. I ask whether variation in early childhood investments can help explain cross-country income differences. I provide new empirical evidence: the adult outcomes of refugees are independent of age at arrival to the United States up to age six, despite dramatic improvements in income and environment upon arrival. A standard model is consistent with this finding if parents but not country are important for early childhood development. This finding limits the mechanisms for generating cross-country early childhood human capital differences. I also provide suggestive evidence on parental inputs. (JEL I24, I26, I32, J13, J15, J24, J31)

scholarly journals The Middle East and the United States: A Problem of “Brain Drain”

1977 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hossein G. Askari ◽  
John Thomas Cummings
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
National Income ◽  
Physical Capital ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrialized Nations ◽  
Managerial Knowledge ◽  
Determinants Of Economic Growth ◽  
And Training

In explaining the determinants of economic growth, economists have attempted to distinguish the relative contributions made by various inputs. Theodore Schultz concluded that improvements in human capital have made larger contributions to growth than increases in physical capital. E. F. Denison was even more specific in his pioneering studies of changes in real national income in the United States from 1927 to 1967, estimating that 23 percent of the growth could be explained by improvements in the educational level of the labor force and 20 percent by advances in technological and managerial knowledge. On the basis of such results, we may conclude that expenditures on education and training, public health, and general research contribute significantly to productivity in the industrialized nations by raising the quality of human capital; thus these outlays command a continuing return in the future.

Wages and Employment in the United States and Germany:What Explains the Differences?

2003 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-602 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Beaudry ◽  
David A Green
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
Technological Change ◽  
Wage Inequality ◽  
Physical Capital ◽  
The United States ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Parallel Fashion

Over the last 20 years the wage-education relationships in the United States and Germany have evolved very differently, while the education compositions of employment have evolved in a parallel fashion. In this paper, we show how these patterns shed light on the nature of recent technological change and highlight the importance of taking into account movements in the ratio of human capital to physical capital when examining changes in the returns to skill. Our analysis indicates that the United States could have prevented the increase in wage inequality observed in the 1980's by a faster accumulation of physical capital.

Lending to the Borrower from Hell

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio Drelichman ◽  
Hans-Joachim Voth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Sovereign Debt ◽  
Risk Sharing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Loan Contracts ◽  
The Right ◽  
Intelligent Model ◽  
New Evidence

Why do lenders time and again loan money to sovereign borrowers who promptly go bankrupt? When can this type of lending work? As the United States and many European nations struggle with mountains of debt, historical precedents can offer valuable insights. This book looks at one famous case—the debts and defaults of Philip II of Spain. Ruling over one of the largest and most powerful empires in history, King Philip defaulted four times. Yet he never lost access to capital markets and could borrow again within a year or two of each default. Exploring the shrewd reasoning of the lenders who continued to offer money, the book analyzes the lessons from this historical example. Using detailed new evidence collected from sixteenth-century archives, the book examines the incentives and returns of lenders. It provides powerful evidence that in the right situations, lenders not only survive despite defaults—they thrive. It also demonstrates that debt markets cope well, despite massive fluctuations in expenditure and revenue, when lending functions like insurance. The book unearths unique sixteenth-century loan contracts that offered highly effective risk sharing between the king and his lenders, with payment obligations reduced in bad times. A fascinating story of finance and empire, this book offers an intelligent model for keeping economies safe in times of sovereign debt crises and defaults.

A HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF DEPRECIATION ACCOUNTING — THE UNITED STATES STEEL EXPERIENCE

1989 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Auman Reed
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Physical Capital ◽  
Cost Accounting ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reporting Bias ◽  
Productive Capacity ◽  
Replacement Cost ◽  
Historical Cost ◽  
Steel Corporation

This paper examines the magnitude of the reporting bias inherent in the historical cost accounting of a firm's physical capital. Reported depreciation data pertaining to U.S. Steel Corporation (currently USX) between 1939 and 1987 are compared with standardized historical cost figures and replacement cost estimates. The findings suggest that replacement cost depreciation would have provided more information about U.S. Steel's ability to maintain its productive capacity than historical cost depreciation did. Thus, this analysis provides an illustration of one of the primary arguments for replacement cost accounting.

Immigrant Entrepreneurship: The Effect of Early Career Immigration Constraints on New Venture Formation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajshree Agarwal ◽  
Martin Ganco ◽  
Joseph Raffiee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
New Venture ◽  
Opportunity Costs ◽  
Paid Employment ◽  
Specialized Human Capital ◽  
New Venture Formation

We examine how institutional factors may affect microlevel career decisions by individuals to create new firms by impacting their ability to exercise entrepreneurial preferences, their accumulation of human capital, and the opportunity costs associated with new venture formation. We focus on an important institutional factor—immigration-related work constraints—given that technologically intensive firms in the United States not only draw upon immigrants as knowledge workers but also because such firms are disproportionately founded by immigrants. We examine the implications of these constraints using the National Science Foundation’s Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System, which tracks the careers of science and engineering graduates from U.S. universities. Relative to natives, we theorize and show that immigration-related work constraints in the United States suppress entrepreneurship as an early career choice of immigrants by restricting labor market options to paid employment jobs in organizational contexts tightly matched with the immigrant’s educational training (job-education match). Work experience in paid employment job-education match is associated with the accumulation of specialized human capital and increased opportunity costs associated with new venture formation. Consistent with immigration-related work constraints inhibiting individuals with entrepreneurial preferences from engaging in entrepreneurship, we show that when the immigration-related work constraints are released, immigrants in job-education match are more likely than comparable natives to found incorporated employer firms. Incorporated employer firms can both leverage specialized human capital and provide the expected returns needed to justify the increased opportunity costs associated with entrepreneurial entry. We discuss our study’s contributions to theory and practice.

Do National Service Programs Improve Subjective Well-Being in Communities?

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristopher Velasco ◽  
Pamela Paxton ◽  
Robert W. Ressler ◽  
Inbar Weiss ◽  
Lilla Pivnick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Change Score ◽  
National Service ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
Community Effects ◽  
Service Programs ◽  
Open Question ◽  
New Evidence

Since the creation of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) in 1964 and AmeriCorps in 1993, a stated goal of national service programs has been to strengthen the overall health of communities across the United States. But whether national service programs have such community effects remains an open question. Using longitudinal cross-lagged panel and change-score models from 2005 to 2013, this study explores whether communities with national service programs exhibit greater subjective well-being. We use novel measures of subjective well-being derived from tweeted expressions of emotions, engagement, and relationships in 1,347 U.S. counties. Results show that national service programs improve subjective well-being primarily by mitigating threats to well-being and communities that exhibit more engagement are better able to attract national service programs. Although limited in size, these persistent effects are robust to multiple threats to inference and provide important new evidence on how national service improves communities in the United States.

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