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School of Economics

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https://hdl.handle.net/1853/70712

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Organizational Unit

Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts

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https://finding-aids.library.gatech.edu/agents/corporate_entities/1157

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 11

Peer Effects and Human Capital Accumulation

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-04-30) Gu, Xin

Human capital accumulation is not only an individual decision but also an interactive process. This dissertation studies how peers affect individual human capital accumulation in the context of in-person education and online training. Firstly, the dissertation examines classmate and close friend peer effects on the cognitive ability formation of middle school students. The results suggest that peers generate a significant positive impact on student cognitive ability development. The size of peer effects is heterogenous across student ability distribution and jointly determined by two channels, peer conformity and peer complementarity. Secondly, the dissertation investigates peer effects on the online training participation of young teachers. The virtual instruction platform data contain the accurate duration of attendance for every individual-lecture pair and allow for the control of individual, lecture, and peer group unobserved heterogeneity. The estimation shows significant positive peer effects on the likelihood of joining an online lecture and the duration of staying. The magnitude of peer effects differs by group and increases with the relationship closeness. The potential driving mechanisms are online social interactions, peer pressure, and reputation concerns. Thirdly, the dissertation develops a two-step estimator that identifies peer effects on the duration of lecture attendance by accounting for the self-selection into lecture participation. The application of the online training data demonstrates significant positive peer influences on the duration of lecture attendance. Overall, the dissertation finds strong evidence of causal peer effects on human capital formation in the traditional in-person environment as well as in the emerging online setting. It sheds light on how peer effects can be utilized to improve the effectiveness of human capital accumulation.
Human capital, decision-making and performance

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-06-17) Xu, Jing

This dissertation investigates how human capital influences decision-making and performance at the firm- and household-level. It has three empirical studies. The first two essays focus on the firm-level managerial human capital. We discuss how to measure the leadership's human capital precisely, and how it affects corporate innovation and productivity. The third one analyzes how household heads' personality traits influence risky investment decisions. The first two essays focus on firm-level study. The first one investigates how a firm's managerial human capital influence its total factor productivity (TFP) via the potential channels of technology progress and efficiency improvement. As the main operation participants, we use the CEO's previous experiences and the composition of the top management team (TMT) to enrich the measures of their human capital. We find that CEO's management vitality and innovative incentives promote TFP, while TMT's diversity impedes TFP.\par In the second essay, we further explore whether a firm’s innovation incentive is the bridge to link managerial human capital and higher productivity. As the major decision-makers, we consider the human capital of the CEO and board of directors (BOD), using similar proxies in the first essay to measure it. The results imply that CEO and BOD's career experiences in various functions, as well as some special experiences, all influence their innovation incentives. To give a broad picture of human capital measurement and its impacts on different levels of the national economy, we shift to household-level research in the third essay. We investigate how household head's risk attitude in different domains, general and financial, influences the investment decision on different types of financial products. We find that risk-averse persons in both facets are more reluctant to invest in risky assets and allocate less wealth on them as well, with a more notable impact on riskier assets. Additionally, financial risk attitude reacts more sensitive towards market turbulence than in the general domain.
On-job learning and human capital accumulation

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018-05-11) Liu, Qinyi

The dissertation investigates the human capital accumulation through on-job learning. It has three empirical studies. The first two essays investigate skill accumulation through performing job tasks. The third one analyzes the labor market effect of tertiary education for full time workers. Using the data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) for USA, we firstly investigate whether cognitive skills can be improved through on-the-job learning, especially via tasks at work. With rich information on job tasks performed at individual level, we construct different job complexity measures: a general job complexity measure, and two specific complexity measures of interactive and analytical tasks. The results show that workers can accumulate cognitive skills through solving complex problems. Additionally, analytical tasks play an important role on cognitive skills, while interactive tasks at work do not show a significant effect. Furthermore, we investigate whether tasks performed at work contribute to the improvement of a worker’s problem-solving skills. Based on two datasets for Germany, the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and “LLLight’in’Europe” project (LLL), we analyze on problem-solving skills at different levels, general problem-solving skills and complex problem-solving skills. The results of two problem-solving skill measures show workers benefit from doing a complex job, and task complexity improves complex problem-solving skills with a much smaller magnitude. In addition, analytical tasks at work play a more important role than interactive tasks. The third essay investigates the difference in effects of tertiary education between full-time workers and full-time students, based on data from the Chinese Household Income Project (1995, 2002, 2007, and 2013). We find that the schooling returns to a college and a graduate degree earned by full-time workers are significantly lower than the returns on corresponding degrees earned via full-time studies, however, there is a much smaller or no significant gap for junior college degrees for those two groups. The results are quite robust with different model specifications and estimation methods. Our further investigation shows that school quality or aging cannot explain the gap fully.
Innovation and business strategy in healthcare markets

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017-11-06) Zhai, Zhe

In the first chapter, we use patent and financial data from the pharmaceutical industry to examine the effects of international innovation on profitability and the channels through which the effects take place. Positive impacts of internationalization are found for both innovation performance and financial performance. In the second chapter, we examine the impact of uncertainty on firms’ decisions related to R&D expenditures, patenting, and physical capital investments using a sample of firms in the global pharmaceuticals industry. Our results indicate that uncertainty has mixed effect on the innovation variables: it affects R&D negatively, but has a weak and ambiguous effect on patents. The estimated impact on capital investment is negative. In the third chapter, using U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recall data from 2001-2013, we examine various factors that may determine recalls. We consider a wide range of firm-specific and device-specific measures such as their R&D expenditures, foreign versus domestic ownership, size of firms, degree of vertical integration, device complexity, profitability, among several other variables. In our empirical analysis, we examine whether there are systematic longer-run differences in recalled devices across the firms in our sample, and whether firm-specific and device-specific attributes can explain why some firms systematically have a higher or lower number of recalls.
Firm-level human capital and innovation: evidence from China

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-07-27) Sun, Xiuli

This thesis examines firm innovation in China from firm-level human capital per- spective since resource-based theory and upper echelon theory reveal that the reason why firms vary in performance is that they differ in human capital. Two types of human capital are examined: general human capital measured by number of highly educated workers, and managerial human capital measured by characteristics (edu- cation and age) of general manager and management team. Besides human capital indicators, we also take R&D, firm size, market structure, firm age, ownership, city fixed effects, and industry fixed effects into account. Given the fact that innovations are made up of multifarious elements and hard to measure and define, this thesis examines firm innovation from three different aspects, patent applications, product innovation and total factor productivity.
Computer Usage and Demand for Paper/Paperboard Products

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-04-09) Lei, Lei

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of computer usage on the demand for paper and paperboard products. A log-linear model is developed to analyze the effect of computer usage on the demand for four categories of paper, newsprint, printing/writing paper, packaging paper and household/sanitary paper. The analysis is divided into two parts. The first part is US monthly analysis. We create computer number index as a measurement for computer usage. Monthly data (from Jan 1992 to Jun 2005) are collected to estimate the effect for four categories of paper. The monthly estimation results support the hypothesis that the increasing usage of computer has a significantly negative effect on the demand for printing/writing paper, and a significantly positive effect on the demand for packaging paper. But it doesn't provide enough evidence for the effect on the demand for newsprint. The second part is the yearly analysis on 16 main countries, which constitute the major demand for paper/paperboard products and are countries with widespread usage of computer. Using the yearly data from 1961 to 2002 and applying fixone model, we find that computer usage has a significantly positive effect on demand for packaging paper. The small difference in US monthly analysis and 16 countries yearly analysis may arise from the different measures in computer usage, prices of paper/paperboard products, and income.
Does market concentration motivate pulp and paper mills to vertically integrate?

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005-09-02) Wang, Gewei

Following sound economic theory, paper mills vertically integrate into pulp production, partly because internalizing the production of their inputs allows them to avoid transaction costs. Higher market concentration, a proxy of higher asset specificity and transaction costs, should encourage vertical integration in the pulp and paper industry. However, this relationship has not been robust in previous studies or in our replication with updated FPL-UW data. Upon a deeper analysis of the data, this study should clarify the mechanism by which transaction cost can induce vertical integration in this particular industry, which does not have well-defined intermediate goods markets. In order to specify the pulp markets where paper mills are likely to trade, we construct a mill-specific concentration measure as a substitute to traditional regional concentration measures. We also narrow our sample to mills producing free sheet paper, the most profitable paper grade in this industry. With such model refinement, this research exhibits a significantly positive correlation between transaction cost and vertical integration.
Price Behavior of Paper and Paperboard Industry

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004-07-13) Zhang, Feng

This paper presents a model of the probability of price response to the previous periods inventory absolute and relative level for U.S. paper and paperboard industry. The initial part of the paper contains a theoretical analysis of the phenomenon. The proposed framework indicates that the inventory level plays an important leading role in the price adjustment. The model is then estimated with monthly data extending from 1980 to 1999. The LPM and Probit models are used to estimate the effect of absolute and relative inventory level on the probability of price variations. The estimated results are in agreement with the oligopolistic market condition of U.S. paper and paperboard industry, showing the price upward adjustment is sticker and rigid than the price downward adjustment while the output level is indifferent to the previous months inventory fluctuation.
Two essays on the demand for and supply of paper and paperboard products

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003-12-01) Luo, Jifeng
The effects of consolidation of price-cost margins in the pulp and paper industry

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003-12-01) Urmanbetova, Aselia