Specific Human Capital Research Articles

Creating Beginner Student-Preneurs Through Human Resource Investment

The independent entrepreneurship program is a program initiated by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology aimed at students who have an interest in the world of business, and provides students with the opportunity to be part of this independent entrepreneurship program. Independent Learning Campus Policy (MBKM). Muhammadiyah University of Makassar as one of the implementing campuses has collaborated in the last few years in implementing this independent entrepreneurship program. This can be seen as an important effort to invest in more specific human capital that will prepare and encourage students to enter the world of economics, especially entrepreneurship. The type of research used in this research is a qualitative approach. The collection technique uses tri-angulation, data analysis is inductive and qualitative, and the results of qualitative research emphasize meaning rather than generalization (Sugiyoni, 2011). The unit of analysis in this research is the individual as an informant. The informants in this research are employees, some of whom have certain positions to fulfill several informant criteria in this research, namely informants who have been working for a long time, informants who are willing to provide information regarding the research object, informants who are directly involved in all activities of the independent entrepreneurship program. The data analysis technique for this research uses a qualitative descriptive method, namely presenting data in written form and explaining what it is according to the data obtained from the research results. The results of this research invite students to be more practical through the process of providing entrepreneurial mindsets and competencies, developing and creating business concepts, entrepreneurial practices and development. Opportunity to study outside campus to develop knowledge in the field of entrepreneurship. This program will also provide benefits for students to get credit recognition from a series of activities carried out amounting to the equivalent of 20 credits.

Entrepreneurship Trainings and Human Capital Endowment: When Learning from External Sources Does (Not) Increase Performance

Abstract Bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) entrepreneurs have few resources to draw on besides their human capital. We analyze the effects of a training program teaching lean management to BoP entrepreneurs in Zambia by comparing its performance effects across individuals with high and low levels of specific human capital. We find that participation in the entrepreneurship training program positively affects management practices related to lean management as well as cost reduction for all training participants. The program, however, has no uniform effect on profits. The effect is positive only for entrepreneurs equipped with specific human capital. Moreover, we observe that this effect is in particular strong for entrepreneurs with vocational education compared to work experience. This suggests that the value of entrepreneurship training programs is contingent on human-capital endowment and calls into question existing notions of what it means to offer such programs.

Unpacking the influence of foreignness on employment prospects within a multinational enterprise: an examination of gender, professional experience and duration of stay

PurposeThe purposes of this paper are to delve into the “liability of foreignness” among immigrants and to explore factors that may enhance or moderate such liability while obtaining jobs in host countries. We explore the competition for jobs in a host country among foreign-born individuals from various backgrounds and local residents, by examining such factors as their human capital, as well as, for the foreign-born, their duration of residence in the host country.Design/methodology/approachApplying configurational theorizing, we propose that the presence of specific human capital can help reduce the challenges associated with the “liability of foreignness” for migrants who have shorter durations of stay in the host country, and, to a lesser extent, for female migrants. Our study draws upon extensive career data spanning several decades and involving 249 employees within a Danish multinational enterprise.FindingsWe find that specific human capital helps established immigrants in general, although female immigrants are more vulnerable. We furthermore find a strong “gender liability” in the industry even for local females, including returnees in the host countries. Our findings suggest that for immigrants, including returnees, career building requires a mix of right human capital and tenure in the host country, and that career building is especially challenging for female immigrants.Originality/valueWhile the concept of “liability of foreignness” – focussing on discrimination faced by immigrants in the labour market – has been brought to the fore, a notable gap exists in empirical research pertaining to studies aiming at disentangling potential means to overcome such liability, as well as in studies seeking to explore this issue from a stance of gendered experience.

Human capital, institutions, and ambitious entrepreneurship during good times and two crises

AbstractResearch SummaryWe argue that the positive relationship between pro‐market institutions and entrepreneurial growth aspirations is dampened for individuals with general human capital (higher education), but augmented for those with specific human capital (experience in the marketplace). However, during a crisis, the differential effect of pro‐market institutions on growth aspirations manifests only for entrepreneurs with specific human capital, with stronger effects than in good economic times. We run our empirical analysis on a dataset of individual‐ and country‐level characteristics during 2005–2020, thus exploiting variation from the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID‐19 pandemic. We confirm our predictions and show stronger results for early stage (compared to nascent) entrepreneurs, and potential complementarities between human capital types. Altogether, our work paves the way to institutional adaptive policymaking.Managerial SummaryPro‐market institutions facilitate business activity. We analyze a continuum of institutional arrangements and show asymmetric joint effects of the business context and human capital on entrepreneurial growth aspirations. General, education‐based human capital can collide with pro‐market contexts, weakening their positive effect on growth aspirations. In contrast, the interaction between pro‐market contexts and specific, market‐based human capital acts as a catalyst of growth aspirations. The (mis)alignment between pro‐market institutions and specific human capital from start‐up or investment experience gains an increased importance during the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID‐19 pandemic. Our findings are stronger for early stage business owners beyond the nascent phase, and complementarities can appear between education and market experience. We discuss policy implications for entrepreneurship education and regional development.

Individual Choices and Firm Specific Human Capital

Individual Choices and Firm Specific Human Capital

인적자본과 기술혁신간의 관계

This study investigate the relationship between human capital, one of the key factors in creating the firm’s competitive advantage, and the technology innovation. From an integrated approach, we divide human capital into firm specific human capital and general human capital and analyze the impact of two human capitals on technological innovation empirically. In addition, we examine when and how this relationship is more stronger or weaker. Using survey data from Korean Research for Vocational Education and Training and 2) NICE information service in Korea, first, we find that both firm specific human and general human capital can enhance the technological innovation of firm. This results suggests that the two types of human capital are crucial variables in improving technological innovation of firm as each unique and complementary resource.
 Second, the relationship between general human capital and technological innovation is more stronger as firms’ international experience increases. In particular, general human capital strengthens technological innovation when interacting with firm international experience, but we do not find the moderating variable effect of firm international experience in the relationship between firm specific human capital and technological innovation. In order to improve the technological innovation of firm, we need to consider not only the firm-specific human capital related to on-the-job training investment but also the improvement of the human capital quality through formal education outside of firm while capitalizing firm international experience. This study conduct the research to identify technological innovation from an integrated point of view, considering not only the traditionally firm-specific but also general human capital, which has recently been paying attention again. In addition, we demonstrate that the firm international experience is the crucial boundary condition, explaining detailed mechanism of the relationship between human capital and technological innovation of firm.

The Reform of Curricula in the Spanish University System: How Well Matched Are New Bachelor’s Degrees to Jobs

This study looks at how well bachelor’s degree holders in Spain match into jobs five years after graduation. Based on workers’ self-assessment, education–job mismatch is defined as the discrepancy between the formal qualifications that individuals earned at Spanish universities and those that are required by jobs. By estimating a multinomial logit model, this research identifies fields of study that are associated with increased likelihood of a particular educational mismatch status. Results indicate that university graduates from highly specialized bachelor’s degree programs are more likely to work in a graduate job that is related to their field of education. In particular, graduates with degrees that entail specific human capital, such as health sciences degrees and hard science and engineering degrees, are more likely to be well-matched in their current jobs. In contrast, the results show a higher likelihood of over-qualification (recent graduates who are in non-graduate jobs) for social and legal sciences degrees and arts and humanities degrees. Gender appears to play no role in the matching process; however, the subject-specific knowledge that graduates have gained from their time in higher education is important. As a novelty, this study also identifies, for a sub-sample of workers, the process through which a good match is achieved—that is, how individuals self-select to accept jobs in which they can achieve a good match. The regression results are based on micro data from a nationally representative random sample of the first cohort of undergraduates after the Bologna curriculum reform.

Asset specificity and farmers’ intergenerational succession willingness of apple management

Understanding the factors behind apple farmers’ willingness to pass on the management of their farms to their descendants is crucial to the continuity of apple production. Due to the high specificity of the human capital, physical assets, land assets, and geographical location in apple production, this study used a binary logistic regression and a mediating effect model to explore the impact of asset specificity on farmers’ intergenerational succession willingness of apple management (FISWAM) and to examine the mediating effects of loss aversion in the impact of asset specificity on the FISWAM. The results showed that about 18.68% of the respondents expressed willingness to transfer their apple business between generations, and the FISWAM was generally weak. In addition to the negative impact of geographical location specificity (GLS), human capital specificity (HCS), physical assets specificity (PAS), and land assets specificity (LAS) can enhance the FISWAM. Loss aversion plays a partial mediating role in the impact of PAS, LAS, and GLS on the FISWAM.

Index approach to the assessment of the formation of human capital of the enterprise

Purpose: of the article is to develop a methodology for assessing the formation of an enterprise human capital, which is based on the calculation of indices of formal and informal learning of its employees.Methods: this article is based on the key provisions of the theory of human capital. The focus of this research is the specific enterprise human capital. The questionnaire method was used, which allowed assessing the development of the enterprise human capital based on the opinions of its direct carriers – employees representing different professional groups. The index method was used. Based on the calculation of the indices of formal and informal learning, the composite indices of the formation of human capital were determined, reflecting the assessment of the actual learning of employees and the desired state in which they feel the need. Visualization of the obtained results is presented in the form of theperception map.Results: the article presents an improved methodology for assessing the formation of human capital of an enterprise. The assessment of the formation of human capital of various professional groups of employees of the enterprise is carried out. The conducted research has shown that the need for formal and informal learning in various professional groups is differentiated. The essence of the author's position is that one of the most important tasks of the enterprise for the development of human capital is the organization of formal and informal learning of its employees in accordance with the current and future needs of the enterprise itself. The prospects for the development of the enterprise human capital are seen in the development of its vocational education ecosystem by strengthening relationships with educational organizations and other providers of new progressive knowledge, and also by strengthening the relationship between formal and informal learning.Conclusions and Relevance: the approach to the assessment of the human capital development of an enterprise considered in the article allows us to give practical recommendations on optimizing the organization of learning of the enterprise employees. The results of the study can be used by the professional community, including business leaders, to form a strategy for the development of human capital.

Specific Human Capital and Skills in Indian Manufacturing: Observed Wage and Tenure Relationships from a Worker Survey.

Successive Indian governments have attempted to increase the growth in employment alongside encouraging skill enhancement. Against this background, we empirically explore issues surrounding the investment in specific capital by workers. In particular, we try to discern the presence of specific human capital investment by investigating whether there is a link between tenure and wages and find that there is indeed such a link evident in India. This allows us to infer that it is valuable to have long-term relations between employers and their workers and therefore labour market institutions that support long-term employer-employee relationship need to be encouraged.

Human Capital and the Success of Minority Entrepreneurs

This research contributes to the literature on how human capital can impact the success of minority entrepreneurs in Arkansas. Human capital includes education, work experience, know-how, and skillsets. In the business environment, an important task of human capital is to deliver productive labor, promote commerce, and produce economic prominence. Human capital is irreplaceable and is unlike any other capital. Entrepreneurs must accomplish objectives and remain innovative. Specific human capital involves unique industry competence, self-employment capability, and leadership experience, which lead to goal achievement. A quantitative analysis of a sample of 287 minority male and female business owners was conducted to measure business revenues, company size, and self-reported performance assessment. After analyzing input from minority entrepreneurs in Arkansas, this article contains findings and conclusions which determine how human capital relates to the success of minority entrepreneurs.

Specific Skills and Its Assessment in A New Institutional Context: Discussions, Challenges and Prospects

The search for new drivers of global socio-economic development in the face of a slowdown (partially due to the COVID-19) put the issues of skills development, including institutional solutions of the human capital formation, at the front line. Despite significant progress in understanding the importance of general skills and their contribution to economic growth, professional skills as the pivot of specific human capital are commonly analyzed through the vague categories like formal qualification and years of tenure. The lack of an institutionalized and commonly accepted practice for measuring professional skills restrains research in economics dealing with returns to skills, as well as institutional studies. The present study aims to partially fill this gap by analyzing the discussion about professional skills in broader discourse about skills and systematizing the existing approaches to professional skills’ assessments, as well as by mapping the prospects in the context of emerging digital technologies and institutional change attributed to them. The analysis was conducted on academic papers and reports published in 2013–2020. The research showed that although the number of academic papers focusing on professional skills is high, the discussion (especially, about assessment) is fragmented reflecting industries’ specifics. The mainstream expert discussion on skills and their assessment tends to focus on general skills, overlooking professional skills, with partial exception of certain digital skills. Discussion largely grounds on traditional approaches, which cannot produce scalable and comparable results for further economic analysis. At the same time, new digital assessment tools are not yet widely disseminated. There is a need for further improvement and expansion of traditional skills assessments via exams or tests, alongside with searching for novel approaches to measuring skills acquired and being used on the workplace. This could also contribute to the institutional studies dealing with the research of transformations happened in corporate, national, and international level.

Human Capital Drivers of Employee Intent to Innovate: The Case of Public Procurement Professionals

Innovation is often promoted as the path to overcoming the burdens of bureaucratic organizations and fostering improved service to the public. In a moment where governments face dynamic administrative and policy challenges, there is great need for leveraging innovative ideas from public sector employees. What is less clear are which factors of employee human capital correlate with feeling encouraged to innovate. We test how three types of human capital influence innovation: organization level, industry specific, and individual specific human capital. We also explore whether there are differences in feeling encouraged to innovate linked to education, training, and demographics such as gender, race, and age. Using survey responses from 2,191 public procurement officers from various levels of government in the United States, we find human capital components including experience, and age correlate with feeling encouraged to innovate, though not always in expected ways.

THE ROLE OF HUMAN CAPITAL FOR EMPLOYMENT GROWTH: A CASE STUDY OF HEIS IN JAMSHORO EDUCATION CITY

The scope and purpose of this paper is to examine the influence and extent of human capital on the employment growth. Such measurement is taken from the higher educational Institutes (HEIs) as empirical evidence. The paper would measure the important factors of the human capital such as education, training and experience as the basic catalysts for the formation of the human capital and when it’s utilized in organized manner it’s incidence on the employment opportunities at micro level and on economy at macro level. Quantitative method is used for this paper, because the aim is to classify features, count them, and construct analysis in an attempt to explain what is observed during the research. It is found that whether it is the general or specific human capital, there should be an urgency to develop customized (need based) skills and competencies to cater the needs of certain industries. It is further transpired that the blend of general (education) and specific (training & experience) human capital ensures the positive growth of employment, as both these factors complement each other.

Shaping the social orientation of academic entrepreneurship: an exploratory study

PurposeDespite growing scholarly interest in academic entrepreneurship (AE) few studies have examined its non-commercial aspects and how it contributes to meeting grand societal challenges. One explanation for this may be the continuing focus of AE on intellectual property commercialization. This paper aims to address this knowledge gap by uncovering how universities can contribute to promoting non-commercial forms of AE.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses the human capital theoretical lens to make its argument and applies it to data obtained from exploratory qualitative research (55 semi-structured interviews and nine focus groups) in the developing countries of Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador.FindingsUniversities can promote different forms of non-commercial AE even in the absence of sophisticated resources for innovation, through the stimulation of the specific human capital of the university community resulting from activities where they help others.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a general framework for advancing theory development in AE and its non-commercial forms, based on data obtained in uncharted territories for AE.

Human capital and the business cycle effects on the postgraduate wage premium

Postgraduate degree holders experience lower cyclical variation in real wages than those with undergraduate degrees. Moreover, postgraduate jobs require more specific human capital. Using an equilibrium search model with dynamic incentive contracts, this paper attributes the cyclicality of the postgraduate-undergraduate wage gap to the differences in specific capital. Greater specific capital leads to lower mobility, thereby improving risk-sharing between workers and firms. The estimates of the model reveal that specific capital can explain the differences both in labour turnover and in real wage cyclicality between education groups.

The New System of Mexican Migration: The Role of Entry Mode-Specific Human and Social Capital.

Between 2000 and 2020, undocumented migration declined, temporary labor migration rose, and legal permanent residents arrived at a steady pace-together creating a new system of Mexico-U.S. migration based on the circulation of legal temporary workers and permanent residents. Drawing on data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Mexican Migration Project, we specify multinomial event-history models to predict the likelihood of departure on first and later trips via four entry categories: no documents, noncompliant tourist visas, temporary work visas, and legal residence visas. The models reveal how the accumulation of entry mode-specific social and human capital powered a system of undocumented migration that emerged between 1965 and 1985, and how that system deteriorated from 1985 to 2000. After 2000, employers took advantage of new visa categories to recruit legal temporary workers, leading to the accumulation of migration-related human and social capital specific to that mode of entry and the emergence of a new system of Mexico-U.S. migration.

The effect of top managers’ human capital on SME productivity: the mediating role of innovation

Using a sample of 309 Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) from Tanzania and applying partial least square structural equation modeling, the study analyses the different effects of managers' general and specific human capital on SME innovation and productivity. The results demonstrate that top managers with higher education qualification place greater importance on non-technological innovation in comparison with their less educated peers. They further show that managers with more years of experience in the sector place higher importance on technological innovation than their less experienced counterparts. In addition, the results show that SMEs with managers who have higher education qualification achieve higher productivity than their less educated peers, with marketing innovation partially complementarily mediating this relationship. The effect of top managers' experience in the sector on SME productivity is shown to be insignificant. This paper uncovers the mediating role of marketing innovation on the relationship between top managers' human capital and SME productivity in Tanzania. Previous research did not consider the role of innovation as a means to translate top manager's human capital into firm productivity. These results help to provide some practical suggestions for managers, entrepreneurs and policy makers. This is a cross-sectional study which might not have captured all the effects of top managers' human capital fully.

Employer Search Behavior: Reasons for Internal Hiring

This article studies reasons for internal hiring, i.e., re-assigning or promoting an employee instead of recruiting an external candidate. We exploit a representative survey of establishments covering all European Union countries to measure employers’ search for internal candidates. Internal search is a widespread practice: 66% of establishments typically search internally. The accumulation of specific skills and the provision of incentives for employees are the main advantages of hiring internally in the theoretical literature. Ordered probit estimates show that on-the-job training and internal search are positively associated. On the contrary, incentive schemes such as variable pay are not associated with employer search. These results help to assess competing theories, and in particular, suggest that specific human capital is an important driver of internal hiring. Finally, we uncover two interesting facts that need further research: internal hiring is less likely in service firms and in non-competitive product markets.

Economic policy uncertainty and company's human capital

PurposeThe research aims to examine the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on a company's behaviour concerning its human capital. Additionally, the difference in effect for companies with specific human capital is analysed.Design/methodology/approachThe hypotheses are tested on a multi-industry sample of large public companies from five European countries, using panel data modelling. The index of Baker et al. (2016) is used to measure EPU.FindingsIn the case of increasing EPU on one standard deviation, companies tend to reduce their human capital by approximately 1.7%. Moreover, despite theoretical assumptions, the effect on companies with more specific human capital is twice stronger. The heterogeneity of effect across countries and industries is also present.Practical implicationsRegulators and governments should consciously introduce changes in relation to regulations and decrease the uncertainty of economic policy to stimulate corporate investments in human capital.Originality/valueThis is the first study that considers the mechanism of EPU and its influence on corporate human capital. The results suggest that concerns regarding economic policy cause companies to reduce human capital.