This paper presents an empirical study based on a survey of 399 owners of small and mediumsize companies in Lithuania. Applying bivariate and ordered probit estimators, we investigatewhy some business owners expect their firms to expand, while others do not. Our mainfindings provide evidence...

Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labor rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...

This article mobilizes and integrates both existing and new time series data on real wages, physical heights and age-heaping to examine the long-term trend of living standards and human capital for China during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Our findings confirm the existence of a...

This paper analyzes the impact of IRCA 1986, a U.S. amnesty, on immigrants’human capital development and labor market outcomes. Because of IRCA, the 1975-1981 arrivals were all legalized by 1990. However, many of the 1982-1986 arrivalsremained illegal. Using the California Latino immigrants in...

We develop a product market theory that explains why firms invest in general training of their workers. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in general human capital, then make wage offers for each others' trained employees and finally engage in imperfect product market...

We examine how globalization affects firms incentives to train workers. In our model, firms invest in productivity-enhancing worker training before Cournot competition takes place. When two separated product markets become integrated and are thus replaced with a market with greater demand and...

We construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities: differences in factor endowments, barriers to technology adoption and the inappropriateness of frontier technologies to local conditions. The key components are different types of...

This report provides an introduction to personnel training (on-the-job training) literature in the economics field. Theoretical models dealing with the initiation of training programmes and their effects on pay at the individual level are discussed, and empirical research on wage effects is...

The debate over whether political democracy is the least bad regime, as Churchill once said, remains unresolved because history has been ignored or misread, and because recent statistical studies have not chosen the right tests. Using too little historical information, and mistaking formal...

Unified Growth Theory uncovers the forces that contributed to the existence of multiple growth regimes and the emergence of convergence clubs. It suggests that differential timing of take-offs from stagnation to growth segmented economies into three fundamental regimes: slow growing economies in...