The problem of the black-white gross earnings gap is near its largest amongst lawyers; blacks earn a significantly lower income than whites (Dinovitzer et al. 2004; Grodsky and Pager 2001). There is also a white advantage in overall job satisfaction amongst lawyers (Payne-Pikus et al. 2010; Dau-Schmidt and Mukhopadhaya 1999). This study examines how social capital contributes to racial differences in these two aspects of overall job success. Social capital theories hypothesize that more social capital leads to increased job status attainment (Lin et al. 1981; Lin 2001). Blacks receive fewer and lower paying jobs than whites, perhaps in part because of a lack of social capital in their lower status and segregated social networks (Braddock and McPartland 1987; Elliot 1999; although see Mouw (2003) for a challenge which showed little to no effect of the use of contacts on earnings). Similarly, Ducharme and Martin (2000) found that social relationships with co-workers increase overall job satisfaction. This project specifically examines social capital in the attorney job market, because this is a specific job market in which there are strong theoretical reasons to expect social capital to affect wages and job satisfaction. Using Portes' (1998) definition of social capital, the ability to secure benefits from one's social networks, I distinguish between three major social networks (professional, non-professional, and kinship), and then derive hypotheses about their effect on earnings and job satisfaction. The main hypothesis is that black and white differences in professional and non-professional networks account for part of the earnings and job satisfaction inequality between blacks and whites. The study also develops competing hypotheses to test the effect of kinship networks on job satisfaction. This study takes a mixed methods approach. Nationally representative longitudinal data from the After the Juris Doctorate Survey (AJD) test the hypotheses to see if there is an effect of social capital on earnings and satisfaction. Qualitative interviews seek to further investigate these relationships and look for emerging themes for racial differences in earnings and job satisfaction. The interviews take place with nine black and white lawyers in Chicago. The survey results reveal the significance of professional social capital networks in obtaining a higher salary among private firm attorneys. The effects of social capital do not vary across race. However, there are some black-white differences in the types of social capital used. The interview results reveal the significance of social capital in acquiring clients in small private firms, and of mentor-protégé relationships. Concluding remarks discuss the significance of professional and non-professional social capital in and beyond the legal profession, explanations for the higher levels of social capital in whites, and suggestions for ways to decrease these racial social capital disparities.

No description available.

An ideal inductive machine learning algorithm produces a model best approximating an underlying target function by using reasonable computational cost. This requires the resultant model to be consistent with the training data, and generalize well over the unseen data. Regular inductive machine learning algorithms rely heavily on numerical data as well as general-purpose inductive bias. However certain environments contain rich domain knowledge prior to the learning task, but it is not easy for regular inductive learning algorithms to utilize prior domain knowledge. This thesis discusses and analyzes various methods of incorporating prior domain knowledge into inductive machine learning through three key issues: consistency, generalization and convergence. Additionally three new methods are proposed and tested over data sets collected from capital markets. These methods utilize financial knowledge collected from various sources, such as experts and research papers, to facilitate the learning process of kernel methods (emerging inductive learning algorithms). The test results are encouraging and demonstrate that prior domain knowledge is valuable to inductive learning machines.

Thesis (LL.M.)--University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Thesis submitted for the degree of M.Phil. April 1997." Includes bibliographical references (l. 241-250). Also available in print.

<p>This is a survey study about the concept of human capital and has to be considered as a collection of opinions, ideas and models. The concept of human capital can be defined, despite the difficulties, as the stock of skills and knowledge, gained through education and experience. A more detailed definition is given and a review of its historic development it is also made. The study then turns to the problem of evaluation of human beings and finds some solutions to evaluation problems that may arise. Earnings or future incomes seem to be a good approximation of human capital value.</p><p>The concept of human capital is then analyzed from an economic stand point and the bonds it has with family, education, training and future incomes are analyzed. Further an explanation of the impact of parents, of the schooling system and of on the job training on the formation of human capital is also made. Other factors, especially sociological ones, are also taken in account and are considered important in influencing human capital. Thus the role of society must not be forgotten.</p><p>All those issues contribute in determining one's income flows during life, as the earnings age profile shows. Differences in opportunities, depending mostly on family and public expenditures in education, and abilities, depending mostly on one's “natural talents”, are deemed as important in determining one's future incomes, direct expression of human capital.</p>

<p>The decision process of venture capitalists has received much attention from researchers and it is a complex and unclear process. There are plenty of factors that affect venture capitalists´ investment decisions. The purpose of this study is to find out the important factors in the due diligence process for the venture capital firms and venture capitalists during their investments. The authors find it interesting to find out factors that influence venture capitalists during their investment decisions according to due diligence process. Qualitative method was seen suitable for this study. Three phone interviews were conducted with three venture capital firms in Turkey named Is Private Equity, Ilab Ventures and Bosphorous Group. The authors find out management, market, location, product, industry and financial factors are important factors for venture capitalists to decide whether to invest or not.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1981. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 317-341). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

This project analyzes the changing views on abortion and capital punishment and how opinions have changed over the past 35 years. This is an analysis of how different backgrounds and demographic factors affect people’s standpoints toward these two practices.

The study investigates the relationship between intellectual capital and share prices on the Nasdaq OMXS30 companies between 2001 and 2010. This, by using content analysis to score the companies' disclosure of intellectual capital and linear regression to test for a relationship with the corresponding share prices. We find a significant positive relationship between Price and Intellectual capital only for one of its subcategories: Internal Capital. The other two, Human Capital and External Capital, were both negatively correlated, explaining why we could not see a relationship between our total Intellectual capital score and price. Apart from this, we see that the average IC disclosure increased significantly during our researched time period and that IC disclosure in knowledge-intensive companies is statistically higher than for capital-intensive companies when it comes to External Capital and Human Capital. For Internal Capital, as well as for Total intellectual capital disclosure, we could not see any difference.

This is a survey study about the concept of human capital and has to be considered as a collection of opinions, ideas and models. The concept of human capital can be defined, despite the difficulties, as the stock of skills and knowledge, gained through education and experience. A more detailed definition is given and a review of its historic development it is also made. The study then turns to the problem of evaluation of human beings and finds some solutions to evaluation problems that may arise. Earnings or future incomes seem to be a good approximation of human capital value. The concept of human capital is then analyzed from an economic stand point and the bonds it has with family, education, training and future incomes are analyzed. Further an explanation of the impact of parents, of the schooling system and of on the job training on the formation of human capital is also made. Other factors, especially sociological ones, are also taken in account and are considered important in influencing human capital. Thus the role of society must not be forgotten. All those issues contribute in determining one's income flows during life, as the earnings age profile shows. Differences in opportunities, depending mostly on family and public expenditures in education, and abilities, depending mostly on one's “natural talents”, are deemed as important in determining one's future incomes, direct expression of human capital.