Low Human Capital Research Articles

Offending Patterns Among Southeast Asians in the State of California

Using California's Monthly Arrest and Citation Register (MACR) data collected by the California Department of Justice for the years 1991-1996, this study examined odds of arrest for various violent and lucrative type offenses, across seven different Asian ethnic groups. To avoid selection bias, African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans were also included in the analysis. Logistic regression models were fitted to the MACR data. Consistent with theoretical hypotheses, the authors found that Southeast Asian immigrants were more likely to engage in criminal activity than their white counterparts and more established Asian groups. Logistic regression results revealed that Southeast Asians, in particular Vietnamese, were over-represented in every arrest category, while non-refugee Asian groups were considerably underrepresented in arrests. Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese were at significantly higher odds of arrest for crimes that tended to produce financial gain, such as theft, car theft, and petty theft. The authors suggest that their findings on Southeast Asians may in part reflect the unique nature of the immigration of members of this group to the U.S., and the multiple disadvantages that they continue to experience, for example, low human capital, lack of English proficiency, and ethnic prejudice and discrimination. Results suggest the need for more programs aimed at assisting Southeast Asians refugee immigrants with their transition into American society.

The Indian software services industry

The Indian software exports have grown in spectacular fashion. Its success has, for the most part, been a combination of resource endowments, a mixture of benign neglect and active encouragement from a normally intrusive government, and good timing. The bulk of the Indian software exports have consisted of fairly mundane services such as low level programming and maintenance. The marked reliance on access to low cost human capital has prompted considerable scepticism about the ability of the Indian software industry to sustain its performance, given the rapid growth in the demand for engineers and the relatively inelastic supply of engineers. This paper reports on the results of research on the Indian software industry. We use a variety of sources, including a questionnaire survey of Indian software firms, and field visits and interviews with industry participants, observers, and US based clients. Although, maintaining the current rate of growth will pose a number of challenges, these challenges are not insurmountable. Not only can the available pool of human capital be expanded by tapping and training the very large pool of English-speaking college graduates, the leading Indian firms are making strong efforts to move up the value chain by acquiring better software project management capability and deeper knowledge of business domains, and reducing costs and improving quality by developing superior methodologies and tools. Moreover, the greatest impact of the software industry on the Indian economy may well be indirect, in its role as an exemplar of the new business organisational form and as an inspiration to other entrepreneurs.

Timing of childbearing and economic growth

This paper incorporates the timing of childbearing into a growth model with endogenous fertility. It analyzes a model in which individuals' human capital stock depends positively on their education and parental human capital and in which producing and raising children and acquiring human capital are time intensive. The model highlights how changes in the human capital stock interact with individuals' timing of childbearing in affecting the evolution of the economy. It shows that increases in the human capital stock raise the opportunity cost of having children while young and induce individuals to delay childbearing. That, in turn, accelerates human capital accumulation in the future. The model also demonstrates that early childbearing may lead to a development trap with low human capital.

Health and Schooling Investments in Africa

This paper first outlines an organizing framework for considering how health and schooling affect labor productivity and growth, and how household and community factors can in turn affect the demand for these human capital investments. Both cross-country growth models and various aspects of microeconomic studies of individual productivity as related to education and health are discussed. The conclusion offers some tentative leads for policy in this area based on existing research, and an agenda for future research.

Timing of Childbearing, Family Size and Economic Growth

This paper incorporates the timing of childbearing into a growth model with endogenous fertility. It analyzes a model in which individuals' human capital stock depends positively on their education and parental human capital and in which producing and raising children and acquiring human capital are time intensive. The model highlights how changes in the human capital stock interact with individuals' timing of childbearing in affecting the evolution of the economy. It shows that, if the complementarity between parental human capital and education in determining individuals' human capital is relatively large, then increases in the human capital stock raise the opportunity cost of having children while young and induce individuals to delay childbearing. That, in turn, accelerates human capital accumulation in the future. The model also demonstrates that early childbearing may lead to a development trap with low human capital.

Timing of Childbearing, Family Size, and Economic Growth

This paper incorporates the timing of childbearing into a growth model with endogenous fertility. It analyzes a model in which individuals' human capital stock depends positively on their education and parental human capital and in which producing and raising children and acquiring human capital are intensive. The model highlights how changes in the human capital stock interact with individuals' timing of childbearing in affecting the evolution of the economy. It shows that, if the complementarity between parental human capital and education in determining individuals' human capital is relatively large, then increases in the human capital stock raise the opportunity cost of having children while young and induce individuals to delay childbearing. That, in turn, accelerates human capital accumulation in the future. The model also demonstrates that early childbearing may lead to a development trap with low human capital.

Explaining the Male-Female Wage Gap: Job Segregation and Solidarity Wage Bargaining in Sweden

The fundamental issue addressed in this paper is why women receive lower wages than men. The relevance of four explanations is investigated: women's responsibility for family and household work, women's lower human capital, compensating wage differentials between men and women, and job segregation The job segregation explanation is given primary attention in these analyses, given that solidarity wage bargaining in Sweden is generally assumed to have promoted equal pay for equal type of job, and hence that no male-female wage differentials ought to exist once the relevant job characteristics are controlled for. Empirical analyses, based on Swedish labour-market data in 1981, show that job segregation indeed explains a sizeable proportion of the gender wage gap, much more than the other three types of factors. A substantial unexplained residual remains, however, net of a large number of individual, family, job and industry characteristics. It is argued that this unexplained wage differential is too large to be explained by misspecification or coarseness of measures The most reasonable interpretation instead is that male and female workers with the same productive attributes, family obligations, and job characteristics receive different hourly wages. The result thus indicates the presence of sex discrimination in the Swedish labour-market, i.e., that solidarity wage bargaining, even at its peak in 1981, did not result in equal treatment of men and women

Junior partners: Women's contribution to family income in Canada

This research examines the degree of financial contribution of married women to their overall family income. This phenomenon is analyzed from the point of view of sex-role/human capital orientations. The sex-role position argues that regardless of women's social, economic and education background their financial input to household economy will always be less than fifty percent because women's financial opportunities are impeded by sex-role configurations and expectations. The human capital thesis explains women's apparent inability to contribute more than half of the family income as a function of their lower human capital; that is, education, professionalization and training in the labour market. Individual data pertaining to thirty-year old married women, taken from the 1981 Canadian census, are examined. Generally, we find support for the positions: Women with relatively high human capital assmulation contribute significantly to overall household income, but invariably that contribution is less than 50 percent of total family income. On average, all women contribute 22 percent of their families annual income, while working women provide approximately 33 percent of the total. This analysis demonstrates what appears to be a pervasive phenomenon in industrial nations: married women are generally junior economic partners within the family. The extent of junior partnerships, however, is somewhat conditioned by women's human capital resources.