This study examines the relationship between investments in human capital and financial performance among U.S. profit-seeking firms. Specifically, it examines whether companies with greater emphasis in human capital are associated with higher profitability later on. The literature covers material ranging from accumulated information on the economy, organizational psychology, academic papers, national surveys, management literature, and workforce studies. The methodology tests a sample of companies from the Fortune 100’s Best Companies to Work For rank. Using correlations, regression analyses, and an analysis of further tests on Fortune 100 firms, the study provides evidence of a positive relationship between higher rankings and higher accounting ratios of NPM, ROE, and ROA. The paper has implications for managers to use human capital as a profit lever. Proper investments can be made using accounting and finance tools to better assess and invest in their employees.

The purpose of this study was to analyse personnel expenditure of the Directorate Veterinary Service in the North West Province and how it impacted on service delivery. Literature on personnel expenditure and its influence on service delivery, particularly in the field of Veterinary Services is still in its infancy. Financial condition was referred as a tool to evaluate trends and patterns in how personnel budgets increases over a period of time as a fraction of the total budget affected the ability of the directorate to deliver services to the citizens of the province. Financial condition uses a percentage change to analyse changes in the budget over time for the Directorate. Budget reports (2000-2002) collected from the Provincial Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Environment was analyzed in terms of a split between personnel and operational. This analysis was then used to elucidate patterns over time for the Directorate as a whole, which were then compared between the regions (using cost centers) to determine any bias in terms of resource allocation. The percentage change was also done per standard budget item used in the Province. From the study it is evident that there was deterioration in financial condition for the financial year 200112001. This deterioration in financial condition is shown by a drop in budget but also in terms of a bias towards personnel. This phenomenon was however reversed in the following year of 2002/2003. This study has identified a negative correlation between personnel budget and other expenditure,:, needs for the Directorate Veterinary Services that had negative consequences for service delivery. To this extent it recommends a regular monitoring process to be put in place and the use of public partnerships where practical as a solution to rising personnel costs.

<p>This dissertation consists of three separate essays that use dynamic models to better understand the human capital accumulation process. First, I analyze the role of migration in human capital accumulation and how migration varies over the business cycle. An interesting trend in the data is that, over the period of the Great Recession, overall migration rates in the US remained close to their respective long-term trends. However, migration evolved differently by employment status: unemployed workers were more likely to migrate during the recession and employed workers less likely. To isolate mechanisms explaining this divergence, I estimate a dynamic, non-stationary search model of migration using a national longitudinal survey from 2004-2013. I focus on the role of employment frictions on migration decisions in addition to other explanations in the literature. My results show that a divergence in job offer and job destruction rates caused differing migration incentives by employment status. I also find that migration rates were muted because of the national scope of the Great Recession. Model simulations show that spatial unemployment insurance in the form of a moving subsidy can help workers move to more favorable markets.</p><p>In the second essay, my coauthors and I explore the role of information frictions in the acquisition of human capital. Specifically, we investigate the determinants of college attrition in a setting where individuals have imperfect information about their schooling ability and labor market productivity. We estimate a dynamic structural model of schooling and work decisions, where high school graduates choose a bundle of education and work combinations. We take into account the heterogeneity in schooling investments by distinguishing between two- and four-year colleges and graduate school, as well as science and non-science majors for four-year colleges. Individuals may also choose whether to work full-time, part-time, or not at all. A key feature of our approach is to account for correlated learning through college grades and wages, thus implying that individuals may leave or re-enter college as a result of the arrival of new information on their ability and/or productivity. We use our results to quantify the importance of informational frictions in explaining the observed school-to-work transitions and to examine sorting patterns.</p><p>In the third essay, my coauthors and I investigate the evolution over the last two decades in the wage returns to schooling and early work experience. </p><p>Using data from the 1979 and 1997 panels of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we isolate changes in skill prices from changes in composition by estimating a dynamic model of schooling and work decisions. Importantly, this allows us to account for the endogenous nature of the changes in educational and accumulated work experience over this time period. We find an increase over this period in the returns to working in high school, but a decrease in the returns to working while in college. We also find an increase in the incidence of working in college, but that any detrimental impact of in-college work experience is offset by changes in other observable characteristics. Overall, our decomposition of the evolution in skill premia suggests that both price and composition effects play an important role. The role of unobserved ability is also important.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation consists of three essays concerning the effects of human capital and health capital on the labor market. Chapter 1 presents a structural model that incorporates a health capital stock to the traditional learning-by-doing model. The model allows health to affect future wages by interrupting current labor supply and on-the-job human capital accumulation. Using data on sick time from the Panel Study Income of Dynamics the model is estimated using a nonlinear Generalized Method of Moments estimator. The results show human capital production exhibits diminishing returns. Health capital production increases with the current stock of health capital, or better current health improves future health. Among prime age working men, the effect of health on human capital accumulation is relatively small. Chapter 2 explores the role of another form of human capital, noncognitive skills, in explaining racial gaps in wages. Chapter 2 adds two noncognitive skills, locus of control and self-esteem, to a simple wage specification to determine the effect of these skills on the racial wage gap (white, black, and Hispanic) and the return to these skills across the wage distribution. The wage specifications are estimated using pooled, between, and quantile estimators. Results using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 show these skills account for differing portions of the racial wage gap depending on race and gender. Chapter 3 synthesizes the idea of health and on-the-job human capital accumulation from Chapter 1 with the idea of noncognitive skills in Chapter 2 to examine the influence of these skills on human capital and health capital accumulation in adult life. Chapter 3 introduces noncognitive skills to a life cycle labor supply model with endogenous health and human capital accumulation. Noncognitive skills, measured by degree of future orientation, self-efficacy, trust-hostility, and aspirations, exogenously affect human capital and health production. The model uses noncognitive skills assessed in the early years of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and relates these skills to health and human capital accumulation during adult life. The main findings suggest individuals with high self-efficacy receive higher future wages.

Regardless of whether organizations are in the private sector or in the public sector, there is a general agreement that human resources are critical to keeping organizations effective as well as maintaining a high level of organizational performance. While more serious effort has been made to empirically examine how human resources influence organizational performance (e.g., studies about turnover consequences, studies about the relationship between human resource management practices and organizational performance) in the private sector, it is rare to find similar empirical studies in the public sector partly because it is hard to define public organizational performance. In my dissertation, I basically investigate how human resources are critical to organizational performance in the public sector with a question, "Do human resources really matter in the public sector, too?" Focusing on the crime control performance of municipal police departments, I examine the relationships among turnover, police performance, and human resource management (HRM) characteristics by surveying police departments of the U.S. cities whose population range is between 100,000 to 500,000 (Out of 205 surveyed cities, 65 cities participated). Firstly, I explore how human resource management practices (individually and systematically) influence crime control performance of the police. Based on universalistic HRM perspective (i.e., best HRM practices) and control theory perspective, I hypothesize that commitment HRM system (and individual practices) will have positive effect on crime control performance of the police. Secondly, I investigate more specific questions such as if turnover has significant effect on crime control performance and if HRM system has moderating effect on turnover consequence. Results about turnover effect confirm human capital theory that predicts the negative effect of turnover when employees with specific knowledge quit. However, no significant relationships are found between commitment HRM system (and individual practices) and organizational performance. The results might help municipal police departments deal with sworn officers' turnover as well as set up proper HRM practices.

This dissertation explores how migration responds to economic conditions, particularly differences in responsiveness for various segments of the population. After a brief introduction and motivation of my work in Chapter One, Chapter Two estimates the responsiveness of households’ interstate migration to origin state labor market conditions and surrounding state labor market conditions. Each percentage point increase in origin state unemployment insurance claims leads to a 3.2 percent increase in household’s propensity to migrate interstate and each percentage point increase in the unemployment insurance claims rate of surrounding states reduces interstate migration propensity by 5.2 percent. I then examine how this responsiveness varies by demographics and how it has changed over time. I determine that the responsiveness of migration to labor market conditions is weaker for several groups at high poverty risk, including less educated, non-employed and rural households and households with children present. I also show that between the early 1980s and mid 1990s labor market conditions became a smaller factor in household migration decisions, but since then labor market conditions have gained in importance. While Chapter Two examines short-run migration responsiveness, Chapter Three explores the size of the long-run outflow (or inflow) of skilled labor occurring in local areas in response to economic conditions, amenities and other area characteristics. I estimate the extent of this brain gain and brain drain within localities in the United States between the early 1990s and late 2000s, describing both absolute changes (percentage growth in the stock of educated individuals) and relative changes (growth in the share of educated individuals). For each of three measures of brain gain estimated, I show substantially more positive flows of educated individuals towards local areas with strong initial economic conditions. I also show that non-metropolitan areas are more likely to experience all three measures of brain drain. I present evidence that nonmetropolitan areas’ inability to attract and retain educated individuals stems primarily from labor market disparities including the urban-rural wage differential.

This dissertation focuses on the relationship between the education-based fertility gap and economic growth and on policy as a determinant of fertility. In the first essay I evaluate the impact of differential fertility (the difference between fertility rates of women with high educational attainment and women with low educational attainment) on economic growth by accounting for critical marginal effects and the general level of educational attainment in a given country. I also examine the possibility that this effect varies based on level of inequality and income levels. I find that for a less developed country with high income inequality, higher fertility rates of women with lower education has a favorable impact on economic development. In the second essay I examine the transmission and magnitude of the effect of differential fertility on economic growth at the subnational level. I explore the relationship between differential fertility and economic growth in a cross-U.S. state context. I find that a larger gap in fertility rates between highly-educated and less-educated women is strongly associated with a decrease in the rate of long-run economic growth across U.S. states, even after accounting for the levels of inequality and overall fertility. In the third essay I explore policy as a determinant of the education-based fertility gap. I use the 2007 Massachusetts healthcare reform which provides a good setting for evaluating the effect of an exogenous policy on the fertility. I find that fertility increases among young married women and decreases among young unmarried women but that there is no asymmetrical fertility response based on the education level of the mother.

To remain competitive in a global market, many organizations are transforming their operations from traditional management approaches to the lean philosophy. The success of the Toyota Production System in the automotive industry serves as a benchmark that organizations continually seek to emulate in search of similar results. Despite the abundance of lean resources, many organizations struggle to attain successful lean transformation. To facilitate investigation of the failure mechanisms and critical success factors of lean transformation, this dissertation addresses the following research questions: (1) Why do transformations from traditional organizational philosophies to lean fail? (2) What are the critical factors for lean transformation success? (3) What is the role of an organization’s human resource performance management system during the lean transformation journey? This dissertation utilizes a multi-method, multi-essay format to examine the research questions. First, managers from organizations in various stages of lean transformation are interviewed to establish a foundational research framework. Subsequently, a theoretical model is empirically tested based on data gathered from a survey of industry professionals with expertise in lean transformation. Data analysis techniques employed for this dissertation include: Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression, case descriptions, and case comparisons. Very few studies of lean transformation investigate behavioral influences and antecedents. This dissertation contributes to practitioners and researchers by offering a refined understanding of the role that human resource performance management can play in the overall lean transformation process. In an effort to characterize organizational outcomes resulting from lean transformation, this research introduces a new construct, Lean Transformation Success, to the literature.

Research investigating women-owned businesses has developed considerably over the past two decades. There are, however, few British studies that have specifically focussed on growth oriented women-owned businesses. The current study aims to fill this gap. Its purpose is to explore the effect of social capital and human capital on the growth of women-owned enterprises in the UK. The research contributes to the knowledge of women's entrepreneurship as the first to study the moderating role of human capital in building and using social capital in the UK. It develops the theoretical premise that women entrepreneurs with higher human capital gain credibility and centrality in networks, accumulating social capital based on their importance for other network members and their business stakeholders. This mixed method study involves both collecting and analysing quantitative and qualitative data. Statistical analysis using SPSS was applied to analyse quantitative data collected through 517 on-line completed questionnaires from three different regions. The qualitative data collected through face to face interviews with 42 women entrepreneurs were also analysed and interpreted. The findings suggest that the social capital possessed by women entrepreneurs plays an important role in the growth of enterprises. Women entrepreneurs use different sources to build and use their social capital at different stages of growth and in different industry sectors such as manufacturing or services. Women entrepreneurs with higher human capital are more likely to identify opportunities, generate ideas and show creative thinking in introducing novel products, services, location, processes or systems, which makes their growth path exponential. There are implications of this study for women entrepreneurs to build and use their social and human capital for the growth of their enterprises. And there are also implications for politicians and business organisations, who must devise policies to develop opportunities for existing or potential women entrepreneurs for building their human based capital.

This study investigates a method for identifying human capital and its effect on company valuation. We devise a measure for the efficiency of human capital based on the personnel cost. We include all companies listed in the financial and industry sector on Nasdaq OMX Stockholm in an attempt to examine human capital and its effect on firm valuation. Our results indicate that a higher efficiency of human capital has a positive effect on return on assets. However, we find that our measure can be interpreted in two ways; either as a firm’s level of human capital efficiency or its dependency on human capital, to achieve its net sales and revenue. We also find indications that the market is valuing firms that rely on human capital lower than firms that don’t. Although our findings are statistically significant, the regressions can only explain a small part of what return on assests is comprised of or the value the market assigns a firm.