A diverse array of factors may influence both earnings and consumption; however, this work primarily focuses on the impact of investments in human capital upon an individual's potential earnings and psychic income. For this study, investments in human capital include such factors as educational level, on-the-job skills training, health care, migration, and consideration of issues regarding regional prices and income. Taking into account varying cultures and political regimes, the research indicates that economic earnings tend to be positively correlated to education and skill level. Additionally, studies indicate an inverse correlation between education and unemployment. Presents a theoretical overview of the types of human capital and the impact of investment in human capital on earnings and rates of return. Then utilizes empirical data and research to analyze the theoretical issues related to investment in human capital, specifically formal education. Considered are such issues as costs and returns of investments, and social and private gains of individuals. The research compares and contrasts these factors based upon both education and skill level. Areas of future research are identified, including further analysis of issues regarding social gains and differing levels of success across different regions and countries. (AKP).
A seminal work in health economics first published in 1972, Michael Grossman's The Demand for Health introduced a new theoretical model for determining the health status of the population. His work uniquely synthesized economic and public health knowledge and has catalyzed a vastly influential body of health economics literature. It is well past time to bring this important work back into print. Grossman bases his approach on Gary S. Becker's household production function model and his theory of investment in human capital. Consumers demand health, which can include illness-free days in a given year or life expectancy, and then produce it through the input of medical care services, diet, other market goods and services, and time. Grossman also treats health and knowledge as equal parts of the durable stock of human capital. Consumers therefore have an incentive to invest in health to increase their earnings in the future. From here, Grossman examines complementarities between health capital and other forms of human capital, the most important of which is knowledge capital earned through schooling and its effect on the efficiency of production. He concludes that the rate of return on investing in health by increasing education may exceed the rate of return on investing in health through greater medical care. Higher income may not lead to better health outcomes, as wealth enables the consumption of goods and services with adverse health effects. These are some of the major revelations of Grossman's model, findings that have great relevance as we struggle to understand the links between poverty, education, structural disadvantages, and health.
Leading international researchers offer theoretical and empirical microeconomic and macroeconomic perspectives on the ways a population's health status affects a country's economic growth.
This collection of Michael Grossman’s most important papers adds essential background and depth to his work on economic determinants of public health. Each of the book’s four sections includes an introduction that contextualizes the issues and addresses the larger stakes of his work. An afterword discusses the significance of Grossman’s approach for subsequent research on health economics, as well as the work others have done to advance and extend his innovative perspective. Determinants of Health explains how the economic choices people make influence health and health behaviors. It begins with a section on the theoretical underpinnings and empirical results of Grossman’s groundbreaking health economics model, first introduced in the 1970s, followed by essays on the relationship between health and schooling; determinants of infant health, with a special emphasis on public policies and programs; and the economics of unhealthy behaviors. Grossman treats health as a form of human capital. He shows that public policies and programs that determine the price and availability of key inputs have critical effects on outcomes ranging from birth weight and infant mortality to cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse, illegal drug use, and obesity. Grossman’s approach has led to a major stream of literature in the field, sparking contributions by the world’s leading health economists, including Joseph Newhouse, Jonathan Gruber, Amy Finkelstein, Michael Greenstone, and David Cutler. His clarity on the role that economics play in people’s good and bad health choices is immensely valuable to the debate over how we legislate and spend on health.
This book containes a series of "state of the art" essays on topics related to health and growth. The Commission on Growth and Development (CGD)--in preparing its own Growth Report--wished to take stock of the current state of knowledge and understanding of economic growth, and thus commissioned a series of essays on a range of thematic areas. One such area is health. The following questions are discussed in the book:Does investing in health raise economic growth? Can governments achieve rapid growth or high incomes without investing in health? What are the options and benefits of different an.
Compensation contracts have become ever more complex and individualized, particularly in the executive compensation domain, where increasingly diverse stakeholder demands and governance requirements have led to the inclusion of more and increasingly interrelated components into compensation contracts. Even the compensation of lower-level employees has become complex as firms individualize employee compensation and use many different rewards simultaneously. Research has examined elements of compensation in isolation but has attempted to avoid the complexities of compensation. This dissertation examines the consequences of compensation complexity and compensation design dispersion and contributes to a better understanding of compensation and its consequences for firms and employees. The first study examines how the complexity of executive compensation contracts affects firm performance. It finds that CEO compensation complexity negatively affects accounting, market, and ESG (i.e., environmental, social, and governance) metrics of firm performance and explores mechanisms that help explain the relationships. The second study examines the effect of compensation design dispersion within top management teams and its impact on executive turnover. The results show that compensation design dispersion affects executive turnover, both directly and in interaction with relative pay level. The third study addresses the role of compensation design dispersion in the development of procedural justice perceptions. Using two experiments, this study shows that compensation design dispersion causes lower procedural justice perceptions, which appears to be less problematic for participants with relatively easier to understand contracts. In summary, this dissertation provides a nuanced overview of complex compensation design and compensation design dispersion. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the effectiveness of compensation as an incentive and sorting tool for organizations, and of the implications of compensation design for the functioning of teams.
In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
This book provides an in-depth investigation of the link between human capital and economic growth. The authors take an innovative approach, examining the determinants of economic growth through a historical overview of the concept of human capital. The text fosters a deep understanding of the connection between human capital and economic growth through the exploration of different theoretical approaches, a review of the literature, and the application of nonlinear estimation techniques to a comprehensive data set. The authors discuss nonparametric econometric techniques and their application to estimating nonlinearities—which has emerged as one of the most salient features of empirical work in modeling the human capital-growth relationship, and the process of economic growth in general. By delving into the topic from theoretical and empirical standpoints, this book offers an insightful new view that will be extremely useful for scholars, students, and policy makers.
This book asks the following incisive questions. Does the body of scholarship on the term "human capital" constitute a species of the meaning of the term "slavery," and if so, in what way? How has the so-called capabilities approach to human development affected the scholarship of human development, in the context of curbing the catastrophic excesses of market behaviour? How is it that some humans can be domesticated to create human capital for other groups of humans? To what extent can the international legal instruments effectively fight and combat child labour? How have dynastic China and India developed very long-term systems for the creation and maintenance of national human capital among its peoples? Have the state responses to pandemics been medicalized as a device for human capital maintenance, and if so, in what ways? What is the true meaning of the term "fit and proper" as it is imported into development and dissolution of human capital at the professional or "mandarin" levels of societies? Taking these questions together, the book Human Capital and Development asks this question: have national forms of slavery developed from what is now described as the capabilities approach to human development, with human domestication and child labour forming national systems of human capital formation, maintained by medicalization and controlled by judgments by authorities of fitness and propriety? Chapter One contains a complete scholarly survey of the field of human capital, covering legal, sociological, regulatory, and economic facets of the field. Chapter Two is a detailed critical literature review of the field of human development, linking this still nascent field to that of human capital. Chapter Three follows from Chapter One, elaborating on the new and virtually unspoken field of human domestication, as it serves to create human capital. Chapter Four discusses the international law field of child labour and elaborates on the dual effects on human capital and human development of child labour in its current form. Chapter Five is a comparative analysis of how the two ancient societies of China and India had deployed systems lasting beyond archaeological spans of time to maintain their national human capital, by regulating their supplies of water to their vast populations. Chapter Six in many ways follows on from chapter Three on human domestication, as it discusses critically how the epideictic rhetoric of pandemic contagion and control might marshal human capital in the various strata of society. Chapter Seven is a critical analysis of how human capital is formed by imperial legislation in the upper levels of society''s "mandarins," its professional classes, by implementing around the world a common "fit and proper," or integrity, test. The overall research outcomes suggest that human capital is human differentiation, by the masters onto the servants. Human development is a dynamic conjunction of those capabilities of apparently freely maintaining social networks. Those who had abolished the progymnasmata education system had now reinstated some lower levels of its simpler exercises, ensuring continuing human domestication and maintaining a human capital in explicit knowledge. Thus, child labour remains a national-level program for formation of national employee human capital. In dynastic China, emperors had wholly owned the people''s human capital, and both stabilized and assessed it through local customary registries. In India, sacred rivers were themselves entities containing the culture''s externalized symbology. The International Sanitary Conferences confirmed already-developing European national rules into an international order of human capital medicalization, disguised as human development. The public parties to a "fit and proper" assessment are said to be the court and an ellipsis of members of the public, without the public ever actually participating in the assessment. Thus, human capital in a profession is created in a national professional class purely by the authority of differentiation.
