This paper studies optimal public debt in a dynastic model with human capital externalities that cause human capital investment (fertility) to be below (above) its socially optimal level. By reducing fertility and raising human capital investment, the optimal debt can exceed 10% of output for plausible parameterizations. r 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: E60; H63; O41

Human Capital and Ethnic Self-Identification of Migrants The paper investigates the role of human capital for migrants' ethnic ties towards their home and host countries. Pre-migration characteristics dominate ethnic self-identification. Human capital acquired in the host country does not affect the attachment to the receiving country. JEL Classification: F22, J15, J16, J24, Z10

The role of talent and creativity in economic development has been a subject of growing interest to social scientists. Human capital is observed both to be an important contributor to growth and to be unevenly distributed geographically. While there is consensus on the importance of human capital to economic development, debate takes shape around two central issues. First, there is the question...

A growth model with endogenous innovation and accumulation of high-tech and lowtech human capital is developed. The model accounts for a recently established fact about human capital composition, which stated that “the richest countries are investing proportionally less than middle income countries in engineering and technical human capital”, due to the consideration of a negative effect of tec...

This paper seeks to quantify two important sources of workers’ wage growth skill accumulation and occupational human capital by constructing and estimating a structural occupational choice model. Accumulated skills are assumed to be more transferable between jobs that utilize similar tasks. Unlike previous work, I allow task usage to vary not only by occupation, but also by hierarchical level w...

Health and education are both components of human capital and contributors to human welfare. One index of human welfare, which incorporates income, education and health, shows that Africa’s level of ‘human development’ is the lowest of any region in the world. In this paper we will frequently compare Africa with South Asia. While Africa’s level of human development is lower than that of South A...

The aims underlying this study are to analyse to what extent the generic human capital and specific human capital of the nascent entrepreneur influences the creation of the innovative firm. The results obtained through logistic regression show the first evidence, with regard to the creation of innovative firms, that more than a higher level of education or professional experience it is educatio...

Decision models related to investments in human capital, based on the strategic role of Human Resources (HR), are affected by existing perspectives of Intellectual Capital Architecture (ICA) and Utility Theory (UT). With the purpose of supporting decision-making process by increasing its quality via better informing stakeholders, human capital investment decision is a crucial component of the c...