Overall, household debt levels have risen sharply over the past decades in EU Member States. While certain levels of household debts can be beneficial, they can become problematic especially with a sudden, unexpected decrease of incomes or increase of expenditures. The current financial crisis...

A workshop on the "The Impact of the Crisis on SMEs" was held in the European Parliament in Brussels on 1 February 2010. This document contains the programme, presentations and proceedings of that workshop.

This thesis consists of three chapters, each of which focuses on different aspects of economic inequality.First, we investigate the differences in wage inequality between the United States and continental European countries (CEU). Wage inequality has been significantly higher in the US compared...

The extent of openness to international trade may alter incentives differentially by gender for labor force participation, particularly in economies in which gender differentials in human capital investments such as schooling are large and in which norms about gender behaviors are strong. This...

This paper analyses the development of software in India and Ireland. The development patterns of the software industry in Ireland and India clearly show both the advantages and disadvantages of being a follower. The most obvious advantage is the ability to sustain growth without a broad based...

Contributed Paper presented at the International Conference on Agriculture Of Ouagadougou (BURKINA FASO), December 4-6, 2010.

New trends in global economy require greater capacity of the agricultural workforce. In order improve agricultural productivity it is needed to increase the level of human capital of the agrarian population. Human capital is accumulatedknowledge, created in the long term process of human...

Social Network Capital and Academic Careers: The Case of a College of AgricultureABSTRACT The relationship between economic performance and various forms of capital anchors a significant portion of mainstream economic theory and applied economics. Human, physical and financial capital represent...

This paper estimates returns to education for a sample of farm operators in NorthernIreland. The analysis examines the relationship between education and on-farm andoff-farm labour incomes. Human capital earnings functions are estimated to identifythe marginal return to education measured as...

Two recent papers, Neal (1995) and Parent (2000) have presented evidence in favour of the importance of industry specific human capital. The authors argued that some or all of the previous evidence on firm specific capital may in fact have been spurious, due to a correlation between firm and...