Human capital, decision-making and performance
Author(s)
Xu, Jing
Advisor(s)
Editor(s)
Collections
Supplementary to:
Permanent Link
Abstract
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.
Sponsor
Date
2021-06-17
Extent
Resource Type
Text
Resource Subtype
Dissertation