The Chinese market transition has provided new opportunities for individuals to improve social status. In contemporary urban China, do people have equal access to opportunities to obtain occupational status? Following theories of human capital, social network and market transition, this study uses a dataset of the 2003 China General Social Survey and interviews, to explore different effects of human capital, family background and social network on occupational mobility from a perspective of work sector change. The first major finding is that the returns for education were highest for those whose first and second occupations were in the state sector. Work experience and party membership were significant only for workers remaining in the state sector and human capital was often considered equal to work ability. In the private sector, occupational status depended on recognition of the ability to work. Secondly, family background was meaningful for workers transferring within both sectors. In the state sector, the effects were mainly through the use of fathers’ political power to make occupational promotion whereas in the private sector, it came down to economic support or information transmission. Thirdly, social network was significant in the form of strong ties if workers stayed in the state sector or transferred there from the private sector. It mainly took the form of job information for those staying in or transferring to the private sector. And last, education significantly affected income for all groups but with the highest returns for stayers. I conclude that for one thing, human capital, family background and social network exert markedly different effects on occupational mobility in four subgroups in contemporary urban China. The use of political power is the main influence of family background and social network, especially for those transferring to the state sector. The institutionalization of occupational promotion based on political power may result in unequal opportunity for job and status mobility and consequently the stagnation of economic and social development. In order to establish a fair labour market, five policy proposals are made related to promotion of a market-oriented economy, disclosure of information in the labour market, law regulation, reform of distribution of socioeconomic benefits, and political system reform.

This thesis contributes to the fields of Public Economics and Development Economics by studying human capital formation under three scenarios. Each scenario is represented in an individual paper between Chapters 2 to 4 of this thesis. Chapter 2 examines the effect of child care financing, through human capital formation, on growth and welfare. There is an extensive literature on the benefits of child care affordability on labour market participation. The overall inference that can be drawn is that the availability and affordability of appropriate child care may enhance parental time spent outside the home in furthering their economic opportunities. In another front, the endogenous growth literature exemplifies the merits of subsidizing human capital in generating growth. Again, other contributions demonstrate the negative implications of taxes on the returns from human capital on long run growth and welfare. This paper assesses the long run welfare implications of child care subsidies financed by proportional income taxes when human capital serves as the engine of growth. More specifically, using an overlapping-generations framework (OLG) with endogenous labour choice, we study the implications of a distortionary wage income tax on growth and welfare. When the revenues from proportional income taxes are channelled towards improving economic opportunities for both work and schooling investments in the form of child care subsidies, long run physical and human capital stock may increase. A higher level of growth may ensue leading to higher welfare. Chapter 3 answers the question of how child care subsidization works in the interest of skill formation, and specifically, whether child care subsidization policies can work to the effect of human capital subsidies. Ample studies have highlighted the significance of early childhood learning through child care in determining the child’s longer-term outcomes. The general conclusion has been that the quality of life for a child, higher earnings during later life, as well as the contributions the child makes to society as an adult can be traced back to exposures during the first few years of life. Early childhood education obtained through child care has been found to play a pivotal role in the human capital base amongst children that can benefit them in the long run. Based on this premise, the paper develops a simple Overlapping Generations Model (OLG) to find out the implications of early learning on future investments in human capital. It is shown that higher costs of child care will reduce skill investments of parents. Also, for some positive child care cost, higher human capital obtained through early childhood education can induce further skill investments amongst individuals with a higher willingness to substitute consumption intertemporally. Finally, intervention that can internalize the intra-generational human capital externalities arising from parental time spent outside the home - for which care/early learning is required to be purchased for the child - can unambiguously lead to higher skill investments by all individuals. Chapter 3 therefore proposes policy intervention, such as child care subsidization, as the effect of such will be akin to a human capital subsidy. The objective of Chapter 4 is to understand the implications of inter-regional mobility on higher educational investments of individuals and to study in detail the impact of mobility on government spending for education under two particular scenarios – one in which human capital externalities are non-localized and spill over to other regions (e.g. in the form of R&D), and another in which the externalities are localized and remain within the region. It is shown that mobility enhances private investments in education, and all else equal, welfare should be higher with increased migration. The impacts on government educational expenditures are studied and some policy implications are drawn. In general, with non-localized externalities, all public expenditures decline under full-migration. Finally under localized externalities, the paper finds that governments will increase their financing of education to increasingly mobile individuals only when agglomeration benefits outweigh congestion costs from increases in regional population.

This thesis contributes to the fields of Public Economics and Development Economics by studying human capital formation under three scenarios. Each scenario is represented in an individual paper between Chapters 2 to 4 of this thesis. Chapter 2 examines the effect of child care financing, through human capital formation, on growth and welfare. There is an extensive literature on the benefits of child care affordability on labour market participation. The overall inference that can be drawn is that the availability and affordability of appropriate child care may enhance parental time spent outside the home in furthering their economic opportunities. In another front, the endogenous growth literature exemplifies the merits of subsidizing human capital in generating growth. Again, other contributions demonstrate the negative implications of taxes on the returns from human capital on long run growth and welfare. This paper assesses the long run welfare implications of child care subsidies financed by proportional income taxes when human capital serves as the engine of growth. More specifically, using an overlapping-generations framework (OLG) with endogenous labour choice, we study the implications of a distortionary wage income tax on growth and welfare. When the revenues from proportional income taxes are channelled towards improving economic opportunities for both work and schooling investments in the form of child care subsidies, long run physical and human capital stock may increase. A higher level of growth may ensue leading to higher welfare. Chapter 3 answers the question of how child care subsidization works in the interest of skill formation, and specifically, whether child care subsidization policies can work to the effect of human capital subsidies. Ample studies have highlighted the significance of early childhood learning through child care in determining the child’s longer-term outcomes. The general conclusion has been that the quality of life for a child, higher earnings during later life, as well as the contributions the child makes to society as an adult can be traced back to exposures during the first few years of life. Early childhood education obtained through child care has been found to play a pivotal role in the human capital base amongst children that can benefit them in the long run. Based on this premise, the paper develops a simple Overlapping Generations Model (OLG) to find out the implications of early learning on future investments in human capital. It is shown that higher costs of child care will reduce skill investments of parents. Also, for some positive child care cost, higher human capital obtained through early childhood education can induce further skill investments amongst individuals with a higher willingness to substitute consumption intertemporally. Finally, intervention that can internalize the intra-generational human capital externalities arising from parental time spent outside the home - for which care/early learning is required to be purchased for the child - can unambiguously lead to higher skill investments by all individuals. Chapter 3 therefore proposes policy intervention, such as child care subsidization, as the effect of such will be akin to a human capital subsidy. The objective of Chapter 4 is to understand the implications of inter-regional mobility on higher educational investments of individuals and to study in detail the impact of mobility on government spending for education under two particular scenarios – one in which human capital externalities are non-localized and spill over to other regions (e.g. in the form of R&D), and another in which the externalities are localized and remain within the region. It is shown that mobility enhances private investments in education, and all else equal, welfare should be higher with increased migration. The impacts on government educational expenditures are studied and some policy implications are drawn. In general, with non-localized externalities, all public expenditures decline under full-migration. Finally under localized externalities, the paper finds that governments will increase their financing of education to increasingly mobile individuals only when agglomeration benefits outweigh congestion costs from increases in regional population.

El objetivo planteado es contribuir a la teoría y práctica de la valoración financiera de la empresa estudiando la influencia que sobre dicha valoración ejercen integradamente gobierno, accionistas, acreedores, empleados y clientes. La necesaria flexibilidad de la vida empresarial se modeliza usando la metodología de las opciones, tanto ordinarias como reales. Las principales novedades se hallan en los dos ámbitos siguientes: 1) de carácter instrumental, que consiste en la forma de utilizar las opciones; 2) en la introducción y cuantificación del papel que empleados y clientes desempeñan en la creación de valor por parte de la firma. Este planteamiento pretende dar un paso adelante en la línea de evaluación de la remuneración de los empleados (lo que podría permitir la mejora de los esquemas de remuneración actualmente utilizados) así como en la de clasificar la clientela de acuerdo al valor añadido que estos dos grupos de personas (stakeholders) hayan aportado durante el ejercicio económico La investigación realizada abre importantes líneas de avance para el futuro, muchas de ellas reseñadas en la Tesis, que indudablemente servirán como hoja de ruta para ir completando el marco de trabajo aquí establecido. El actual estado de desarrollo de nuestros sistemas económicos necesitan nuevos enfoques, siendo muy prometedor el aquí planteado y utilizado. / This thesis focuses on the field of market valuation of relatively large firms and it refers markets with “normal” behavior, where classical assumptions apply, such as rationality and dynamical stability, in an attempt to investigate the firm's value creation so as to reveal the contribution of all possible stakeholders that might be involved in the formation of the market value of a firm. The literature review related to valuation models, especially the DCF model, has shown that the conceptual frame of Modigliani and Miller, to determine the market value of a firm as it is understood today, is too restricted because only three types of stakeholders (shareholders, debtholders and government) are considered. This work contributes to build an extending valuation model which incorporates some other stakeholders (different from shareholders, debtholders and government), such as employees and clients so as to reflect their influence on the firm's market value. Based upon the work of Rao and Stevens (2007) which reflects the role of the three types of stakeholders with a special emphasis on the role of government, real options theory is applied here to quantify the value created through a major degree of loyalty and capture policies for both employees and clients. One fundamental option is proposed when building the model and it is related to the employees' and clients' portfolio of a firm, which has options to improve returns by driving up the motivations of employees, the fidelity of clients, the capture of talents, the information campaigns to clients and/or investors. Through applying real options theory, this thesis finds an appropriate way for treating the uncertainty and integrating the risks associated with it in valuation models, along with considering the flexibility as an ingredient of value in managerial decisions, increasing the capability to give alternative actions. The approach in this thesis is almost theoretical with a possible scheme for empirical experiments suggested for future research. The results achieved attempt to suggest that there exists communication vehicles for the information about an increase of the satisfaction degree of employees and customers in such way to be truly transmitted to investors and thus to be converted into an increase of the firm's market value.

Under 2010 var nästan var tredje VC investering i Sverige riktat till Life Sciences.Life Sciences är en bransch som täcker områdena bioteknik, medicinteknik, medicin och sjukvård. Branschen kännetecknas av att företagen arbetar mycket utifrån framtida förväntningar och ej framställda produkter. Därför är det viktigt för VC företagen som agerar inom Life Sciences att kunna identifiera den potential och de problem som kommer med en investering. För att bekräfta potentialen och problemen genomförs en due diligence. Due diligence är till för att finna styrkor och svagheter. Det är de anställda på VC företagens uppgift att genomföra due diligence vilket innebär att det är viktigt att inneha anställda med den rätta kompetensen. Denna studie syftar till att undersöka hur anställda kan påverka due diligence.    Utgångspunkten för studien är att beskriva hur due diligence genomförs av VC företag som investerar inom Life Sciences. Den ska även förklara hur de anställda kan påverka denna process. För att kunna genomföra det har vi arbetat genom tre olika delar av due diligence. Dessa är kommersiell, finansiell och juridisk. Varje del har sitt fokus men är av samma betydelse för att få fram ett samlat värde. Tidigare forskning har identifierat att utbildning, erfarenhet och nätverk är viktiga egenskaper för anställda som ska utvärdera ett investeringsobjekt. Utifrån det har vi samlat på oss teorier för att kunna identifiera vilken påverkan anställda kan ha på due diligence genom dessa egenskaper.   Studien har utarbetats ifrån det kvalitativa synsättet. Eftersom att forskningen inom Venture capital relaterat till Life Sciences är knapp finns det få studier att luta sig emot. För att kunna fånga hur due diligence genomförs och hur de anställda påverkar anser vi att den kvalitativa metoden är att föredra framför den kvantitativa. Vi har intervjuat personer som har en aktiv roll och ett stort ansvar i due diligence. Vi har låtit respondenterna svara för företagen som helhet.   I slutsatsen kommer vi fram till att oberoende vilken sammansättning av anställda VC företagen har genomförs due diligence mycket likartat. Det är tydligt att anställda kan påverka due diligence och då framförallt i den kommersiella genom egenskaperna utbildning och erfarenhet.

Post-industrial economic restructuring in developed countries has downgraded the role of blue-collar labour in regional growth, giving way, conversely, to occupations that demand high concentrations of human capital. Human capital has been documented to positively affect regional growth and income, signifying an urban planning shift towards amenities provision, as a human capital attraction tool. An emerging, highly-valued amenity in the post-industrial society is nightlife. Following Florida’s reasoning on the rising salience of the creative class, this paper investigates the hypothesis that nightlife attracts high human capital or skilled individuals. It focuses on the paradigm of Greece, using data acquired by the Greek statistics agency and, to a lesser extent, the Greek yellow pages. It employs two measures, the human capital one –calculated as the percentage of the population holding a bachelor degree and above- and an approximation of Florida’s creative class measure –occupational categorization according to job complexity. Bivariate correlations are applied to account for human capital attracting factors and structural equation modelling to assess nightlife’s impact on the two measures and respectively, on regional growth.

Uppsatsens syfte är att se vilka faktorer som kan vara avgörande och vad det är som styr urvalsprocessen vid valet av en ny styrelseledamot ur ett genusperspektiv. Studien baseras på Handelsbankens styrelse som är den av storbankerna i Sverige med störst snedfördelning mellan könen i styrelsen. Det mesta av materialet vi studerat är tryckta källor i form av årsredovisningar och vetenskapliga artiklar men vi har även använt oss av en enkät som är skickat till Alecta som är en av röstrepresentanterna till bankens valberedning. Undersökningen delas in i tre olika delar vilka är humankapital, social identitet och ledarskap. Syftet med teorierna var att se om de stämde in i verkligheten på Handelsbankens styrelse. Varje del har analyserats var för sig för att sedan kopplats samman i slutsatsen. Analysen sker genom en koppling mellan teorin, den empiriska metoden samt med svaren från frågeformuläret. Studiens resultat visar att det inte är så stor skillnad mellan könen i styrelsen på Handelsbanken när man tittar till humankapital och ledarskap. Dock visar studien att männen i Handelsbanken har skapat sig ett socialt nätverk och är en mer benägna att omge sig med människor som påminner om deras egen bakgrund, profiler och värderingar. Detta gör det också lättare för dem i gruppen att rekommendera andra i deras nätverk att ansluta till Handelsbankens styrelse vid val av en styrelseledamot och därmed har både män och kvinnor som står utanför svårt att ta sig in i gruppen. Genom att i framtiden upprepa denna studie går det att utläsa om ambitionen, via de riktlinjer som finns, uppfylls i högre grad, d.v.s. om fördelningen mellan könen i styrelsen bättre speglar de framtida visionerna om att könsfördelningen blir jämnare och att antalet kvinnliga ledamöter beräknas öka. Det skulle även vara av stort intresse att utvidga studien över längre tid då det är en långsamtgående process. / The purpose of this dissertation is to define what criteria that are decisive and what it is that controls the selection process when choosing a new member of the board from a gender perspective.  The survey is based on the board of Handelsbanken which is one of the major banks in Sweden with the largest misallocation between the genders. Most of the studied material is printed sources in form of annual reports and scientific articles but also a questionnaire that has been sent to Alecta which is one of the parts representing the nomination for board members in the bank. The survey is also divided into three different parts which are human capital, social identity and leadership. The purpose of the theories is to see whether they reflected the actual conditions in the board of Handelsbanken.  Each part has been analyzed and then linked together in the conclusion. The analysis is done by linking the theory and the empirical method with the answers from the questionnaire. The result of the survey shows that there isn’t any big difference between the genders in the board at Handelsbanken when you look closer to human capital and leadership. However, the study shows that the men in the board of Handelsbanken have created a social network and are more likely to surround themselves with people that are similar to their background, profiles and values. This also makes it easier for the ones in the group to recommend other people in their network to join the board of Handelsbanken when selecting a board member and therefore both men and women outside the group have difficulties to join. By repeating this survey in the future, we can tell if the ambition, through the existing guidelines, are met to a greater extent, that is, if the gender division of the board better reflect the future visions of the gender distribution becoming  more even and the number of female board members are expected to increase. It would also be of great interest to extend the survey over longer time because it is a slow working process.

The three chapters of my dissertation examine immigrant assimilation in the Canadian labour market. Through three levels of analysis, which are distinguished by the sample restrictions that are employed, I investigate immigrant labour force and job dynamics, immigrant propensity for self-employment, and immigrant wage assimilation, respectively. In the first chapter, I exploit recently-introduced immigrant identifiers in the Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the longitudinal dimension of these data to compare the labor force and job dynamics of Canada's native-born and immigrant populations. I am particularly interested in the role of job, as opposed to worker, heterogeneity in driving immigrant wage disparities and in how the paths into and out of jobs of varying quality compares between immigrants and the native-born. The main finding is that the disparity in immigrant job quality, which does not appear to diminish with years since arrival, reflects a combination of relatively low transitions into high-wage jobs and high transitions out of these jobs. The former result appears about equally due to difficulties obtaining high-wage jobs directly out of unemployment and in using low-wage jobs as stepping-stones. I find little or no evidence, however, that immigrant jobseekers face barriers to low-wage jobs. We interpret these findings as emphasizing the empirical importance of the quintessential immigrant anecdote of a low-quality "survival job" becoming a "dead-end job". The second chapter analyzes immigrant choice of self-employment versus paid employment. Using the Canadian Census public use microdata files from 1981 to 2006, I update the Canadian literature on immigrant self-employment by examining changes in the likelihood of self-employment across arrival cohorts of immigrants and how self-employment rates evolve in the years following migration to Canada. This study finds that new immigrants, who arrived between 1996 and 2005, turned to self-employment at a faster rate than the earlier cohorts and that immigrants become increasingly likely to be self-employed as they spend more time in Canada. More important, I examine immigrant earnings outcomes relative to the native-born, instead of within, sectors and thus explore the extent to which a comparative advantage in self-employment, captured by the difference in potential earnings between the self- and paid-employment sectors, can explain the tremendous shift toward self-employment in the immigrant population. The results show that the earnings advantage between the self- and the paid-employment sectors accounts for the higher likelihood of self-employment for traditional immigrants in the years following migration. However, the potential earnings difference cannot explain the reason that non-traditional immigrants are more likely to be self-employed as they consistently lose an earnings advantage in the self-employment sector relative to the paid-employment sector. My paper suggests that immigrants may face barriers to accessing paid-employment, or immigrants are attracted to self-employment by non-monetary benefits. Lastly, in the third chapter, studies which estimate separate returns to foreign and host-country sources of human capital have burgeoned in the immigration literature in recent years. In estimating separate returns, analysts are typically forced to make strong assumptions about the timing and exogeneity of human capital investments. Using a particularly rich longitudinal Canadian data source, I consider to what extent the findings of the Canadian literature may be driven by biases arising from errors in measuring foreign and host-country sources of human capital and the endogeneity of post-migration schooling and work experience. The main finding is that the results of the current literature by and large do not appear to be driven by the assumptions needed to estimate separate returns using the standard data sources available.

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.

The advent of urbanization has paved the way for the emergence of varied social problems amongst which is youth unemployment. The occurrence of youth unemployment varies across countries with its nature and extent been determined by the local context in which it prevails. Youth unemployment in Cameroon is a major problem prevailing in urban areas in the country, based on the high rate of unemployed young people in the country. This study was set to analyze the prevalence of youth unemployment as an urban social problem with the goal of providing a better understanding of its prevalence. The problem was analyzed around the individual and structural perspectives with the aid of the individualization concept and human capital concept. Three themes constituted the central issues that guided the study of the problem; they are; views on causes, its impact, and measures adopted to address it. The premise behind these themes was geared towards outlining governmental as well as public opinion on the causes of the problem, as well as analyzing the measures the government has adopted or set in place in a bid to mitigate the occurrence of unemployment amongst youth.