Matching Items (21)
Description
This dissertation examines the role that business counselors in a public entrepreneurial development program play in improving the Entrepreneurial Specific Human Capital (ESHC) of nascent and active entrepreneurs. Through multiple research methodologies, this study identifies the types of ESHC provided by business counselors then compares them to the types of ESHC commonly accepted as necessary for entrepreneurial success. The comparison reveals a number of insights for policy and research, most notably a minimum portfolio of skills necessary for entrepreneurial success. This study also examines the methods counselors use to help entrepreneurs acquire higher levels of ESHC. These methods allow counselors to assist entrepreneurs in recognizing and overcoming common barriers to business growth, and a model of entrepreneurial business growth barriers has been produced which depicts these barriers as conceptual-operational transition points for the entrepreneur. Additionally, this dissertation develops important information about the use of the business plan in entrepreneurial development, and uncovers a number of moderators in the relationship between the use of the business plan and entrepreneurial success. Finally, the study produces detailed information about ESHC which has potential for scale development, and highlights a number of insights for policy and research that have not been identified previously.
ContributorsDahlstrom, Timothy R (Author) / Chapman, Jeffrey I. (Thesis advisor) / Phillips, Rhonda (Committee member) / Knopf, Richard (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
There are many different approaches to the analysis of regional economic growth potential. One of the more recent is the theory of the creative class, and its impact on creative centers. Much of the criticism surrounding this theory is in how the creative class is defined and measured. The goal of this thesis is to explore alternate definitions to better understand how these variations impact the ranking of creative centers as well as their location through space and time. This is important given the proliferation of rankings as a benchmarking tool for economic development efforts. In order to test the sensitivity that the creative class has to definitional changes, a new set of rankings of creative centers are provided based on an alternate definition of creative employment, and compared to Richard Florida's original rankings. Findings show that most cities are not substantially affected by the alternate definitions derived in this study. However, it is found that particular cities do show sensitivity to comparisons made to Florida's definition, with the same cities experiencing greater variations in rank over time.
ContributorsDe Luca, Anthony J., Jr (Author) / Mack, Elizabeth A. (Thesis advisor) / Arreola, Daniel (Committee member) / Rey, Sergio (Committee member) / Talen, Emily (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
An asset-based approach to vulnerability, as presented in Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us? and World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty, provides a possible theoretical framework for understanding vulnerability to human trafficking. Case studies, field studies and narratives of human trafficking provide evidence that the assets of victims of trafficking play a significant role in human trafficking. This appears to be true both with regard to how traffickers exploit victim assets and with regard to how successful human trafficking prevention efforts are implemented. By exploring and further establishing this connection, I hope to provide evidence that a model of human trafficking acquisition incorporating elements of victim assets and the assets of communities deserves field-testing. Such field-testing will hopefully confirm the deep connection between assets and human trafficking activity and establish the necessary connections anti-trafficking activists will need to create a predictive version of the model with regard to individual vulnerability to human trafficking. Lastly, I argue that, provided the connection between human trafficking vulnerability and victim asset levels holds, an asset-based approach provides a rhetorical framework to resist policies that compromise asset levels of particularly vulnerable populations.
ContributorsFees, Kyle Elliot (Author) / Stancliff, Michael (Thesis advisor) / Behl, Natasha (Committee member) / Murphy Erfani, Julie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This dissertation integrates research on boards of directors with human and social capital perspectives to examine board appointments. A director's appointment to a board is in part due to the belief that the individual can contribute critical resources and monitoring to the organization. The ability of a director to provide these resources and monitoring depends on his or her level of human and social capital. This dissertation more fully integrates human and social capital perspectives into our understanding of board appointment events. From these theoretical underpinnings, a model is developed proposing that several human and social capital indicators, including educational level, expertise, director experience, and access to network structural holes, affect the likelihood of joining a new board, joining a prestigious board, and exiting a current board. I also consider a number of contextual- and individual-level variables that may potentially moderate the relationship between a director's human and social capital and director mobility. Through this dissertation, I make a number of contributions to the literatures on boards, board appointments, and human and social capital. First, I offer a more comprehensive perspective of the board appointment process by developing an individual-level perspective of board appointments. Second, I contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the market for corporate directors. Third, I focus on several salient dimensions of director mobility. Fourth, I contribute to the growing literature on human and social capital at the board and director levels. Finally, I add to the growing literature on director selection.
ContributorsWithers, Michael C (Author) / Hillman, Amy J. (Thesis advisor) / Certo, S. Trevis (Committee member) / Khanna, Poonam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This dissertation consists of two essays. The first measures the degree to which schooling accounts for differences in industry value added per worker. Using a sample of 107 economies and seven industries, the paper considers the patterns in the education levels of various industries and their relative value added per worker. Agriculture has notably less schooling and is less productive than other sectors, while a group of services including financial services, education and health care has higher rates of schooling and higher value added per worker. The essay finds that in the case of these specific industries education is important in explaining sector differences, and the role of education all other industries are less defined. The second essay provides theory to investigate the relationship between agriculture and schooling. During structural transformation, workers shift from the agriculture sector with relatively low schooling to other sectors which have more schooling. This essay explores to what extent changes in the costs of acquiring schooling drive structural transformation using a multi-sector growth model which includes a schooling choice. The model is disciplined using cross country data on sector of employment and schooling constructed from the IPUM International census collection. Counterfactual exercises are used to determine how much structural transformation is accounted for by changes in the cost of acquiring schooling. These changes account for small shares of structural transformation in all economies with a median near zero.
ContributorsSchreck, Paul (Author) / Herrendorf, Berthold (Committee member) / Lagakos, David (Committee member) / Schoellman, Todd (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This study utilized ecological theory and social exchange theory to examine how father involvement effects the human capital accumulation of young mothers. This study used data from a sub-sample of young mothers taken from the Healthy Families Arizona longitudinal evaluation (N = 84). The participants in the sub-sample were between 13 and 21 years of age. Using a random effects regression model, it was found that father involvement negatively affects a young mother's school attendance over time. The probability of a mother attending school when the father is involved decreases by 12%. It was also found that for the average age mother (19 years of age), the probability of attending school decreases by 59% every additional year. Furthermore, for a mother with an average number of children (one child), every additional child she has decreases the probability of attending school by 24%. In addition it was found that for the average age mother (19 years of age) every additional year, the likelihood of being employed increases 2.9 times, and for a mother with an average number of children (one child) every additional child decreases the likelihood of employment by .88 times.
ContributorsRojas, Rose (Author) / Krysik, Judy (Thesis advisor) / Shapiro, Alyson (Committee member) / Lecroy, Craig (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Are there measurable differences between the human capital of the refugee children born inside and outside of the United States? If so, does the amount of time spent abroad before immigrating matter, and can we get an idea of what happens to this gap over time? Looking at the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) 1991-2006, I examine standardized test scores and other indicators of performance of young Indochinese refugees and immigrants. This study finds evidence for a negative correlation between being born abroad and performance in selected metrics at the time of early adolescence. This is extended into a negative relationship between the lengths of time abroad before coming to the United States (age of arrival) and those same metrics. However, this study finds signs that this gap in human capital is at least partly bridged by the time of early adulthood. It remains unclear though, whether this possible catch up is reflected in other early adult outcomes such as household income.
ContributorsWatterson, Christen Brock (Author) / Schoellman, Todd (Thesis director) / Leiva Bertran, Fernando (Committee member) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first two explore the impact of government policies on human capital accumulation.
Chapter one makes two novel contributions related to the two workhorse models in the human capital literature: Learning by Doing (LBD) and Ben-Porath (BP).
First, I show that BP is much more consistent with empirical life-cycle patterns related to individual earnings growth rates relative to LBD.
Second, I show that the same model features that generate different life-cycle predictions between models also generate different policy implications. In particular, increasing the top marginal labor tax rate, relative to the current US level, generates much larger reductions in lifetime human capital accumulation in the BP model versus the LBD model.
Chapter two examines reforms to the Social Security taxable earnings cap in the context of a human capital model. Old age Social Security benefits in the US are funded by a 10.6% payroll tax up to a cap of $118,500. There has been little work examining the likely outcomes of such a policy change. I use a life-cycle BP human capital model with heterogeneous individuals to investigate the aggregate and distributional steady state impacts of several policy changes the earnings cap. I find that when I eliminate the cap: (1) aggregate output and consumption fall substantially; (2) the role of endogenous human capital is first order; (3) total federal tax revenues are lower or roughly unchanged; (4) about 1/3 of workers are made worse off.
The final chapter studies the existence and optimality of equilibria in the presence of asymmetric information. I develop an equilibrium concept which corresponds to the presence of mutual insurance organizations for a class of adverse selection economies which includes the Spence (1973) signaling and Rothschild-Stiglitz (1976) insurance environments. The defining features of a mutual insurance organization are that policy holders are also the owners of the organization, and that the organization can write policies for which the terms depend on the experience of the mutual members. In general the equilibrium exists and is weakly Pareto optimal. Further, all equilibria have the same individual type utility vector.
Chapter one makes two novel contributions related to the two workhorse models in the human capital literature: Learning by Doing (LBD) and Ben-Porath (BP).
First, I show that BP is much more consistent with empirical life-cycle patterns related to individual earnings growth rates relative to LBD.
Second, I show that the same model features that generate different life-cycle predictions between models also generate different policy implications. In particular, increasing the top marginal labor tax rate, relative to the current US level, generates much larger reductions in lifetime human capital accumulation in the BP model versus the LBD model.
Chapter two examines reforms to the Social Security taxable earnings cap in the context of a human capital model. Old age Social Security benefits in the US are funded by a 10.6% payroll tax up to a cap of $118,500. There has been little work examining the likely outcomes of such a policy change. I use a life-cycle BP human capital model with heterogeneous individuals to investigate the aggregate and distributional steady state impacts of several policy changes the earnings cap. I find that when I eliminate the cap: (1) aggregate output and consumption fall substantially; (2) the role of endogenous human capital is first order; (3) total federal tax revenues are lower or roughly unchanged; (4) about 1/3 of workers are made worse off.
The final chapter studies the existence and optimality of equilibria in the presence of asymmetric information. I develop an equilibrium concept which corresponds to the presence of mutual insurance organizations for a class of adverse selection economies which includes the Spence (1973) signaling and Rothschild-Stiglitz (1976) insurance environments. The defining features of a mutual insurance organization are that policy holders are also the owners of the organization, and that the organization can write policies for which the terms depend on the experience of the mutual members. In general the equilibrium exists and is weakly Pareto optimal. Further, all equilibria have the same individual type utility vector.
ContributorsBlandin, Adam (Author) / Ventura, Gustavo (Thesis advisor) / Schoellman, Todd (Committee member) / Wiswall, Matthew (Committee member) / Bick, Alexander (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Unmanned aerial vehicles have received increased attention in the last decade due to their versatility, as well as the availability of inexpensive sensors (e.g. GPS, IMU) for their navigation and control. Multirotor vehicles, specifically quadrotors, have formed a fast growing field in robotics, with the range of applications spanning from surveil- lance and reconnaissance to agriculture and large area mapping. Although in most applications single quadrotors are used, there is an increasing interest in architectures controlling multiple quadrotors executing a collaborative task. This thesis introduces a new concept of control involving more than one quadrotors, according to which two quadrotors can be physically coupled in mid-flight. This concept equips the quadro- tors with new capabilities, e.g. increased payload or pursuit and capturing of other quadrotors. A comprehensive simulation of the approach is built to simulate coupled quadrotors. The dynamics and modeling of the coupled system is presented together with a discussion regarding the coupling mechanism, impact modeling and additional considerations that have been investigated. Simulation results are presented for cases of static coupling as well as enemy quadrotor pursuit and capture, together with an analysis of control methodology and gain tuning. Practical implementations are introduced as results show the feasibility of this design.
ContributorsLarsson, Daniel (Author) / Artemiadis, Panagiotis (Thesis advisor) / Marvi, Hamidreza (Committee member) / Berman, Spring (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
These essays attempt to explore how technological change, technology diffusion and economic distortions shape the aggregate economy. The first chapter empirically documents that wage inequality within the group of skilled workers in the U.S. has significantly widened since 2000 and that the changing trend of wage inequality was entirely driven by the non-routine analytic occupation. The model I build demonstrates that the task allocation induced by investment- specific technical change can widen the within-group wage inequality because of the “composition effect”. The quantitative results provide a well-matched timing and magnitude of the non-linear expansion path in wage inequality that is observed in the data. In chapter two I explore the role human capital plays in the convergence of Asian growth miracles. I incorporate the idea that education could facilitate technology diffusion into a growth framework by developing a model of human capital investment, adding a role for human capital in the convergence of productivities towards the technology frontier. I then calibrate my model to the South Korea between 1960 and 2019. My model can remarkably match the ‘S Shaped’ convergence trajectory in South Korea well. More importantly, the quantitative exercises demonstrate that a significant extent of the externality is required to match the transition path of output in South Korea. A series of quantitative experiments suggest that if the externality is removed from the model, then it cannot quantitatively match South Korea’s convergence pattern well. Chapter three documents a fact that that firms in developing economies face both financing constraints and face size-dependent distortions. The two distortions, however, affect firms in opposite ways. I build a model showing that the adverse effects associated with size-dependent distortions drastically reduce, and may even reverse, if firms also face financing constraints. This occurs because the misallocation effects of the two may offset each other. The quantitative analysis shows that size- dependent distortions estimated from data lead to up to 25 percent of output drop if they are implemented alone, but have virtually no effect on aggregate output in the presence of empirically relevant capital financing constraints.
ContributorsQian, Long (Author) / Ventura, Gustavo (Thesis advisor) / Brooks, Wyatt (Thesis advisor) / Vereshchagina, Galina (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023