Early child neurodevelopment has major impacts on future human capital and health. However, not much is known about the impacts of prenatal risk factors on child neurodevelopment. This study evaluates the effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy on child neurodevelopment between 3 and 24 months of age and interactions with socioeconomic status (SES). Data from a unique sample of children fr...

The complexity of economies nowadays necessitates qualified workers more than ever. Given the great share of services in production and employment, the educational attainment of the people employed in this sector has a special impact on growth. Following this reasoning, the aim of this paper is to analyse the extent to which the differences in the location of the service sector can explain the ...

It has often been claimed that measures designed to stimulate capital formation at the national level will accelerate the decline of regions that are not growing. A number of simple models are employed to evaluate this claim, and it is found that the effect of national subsidies is ambiguous. Further, it is shown that on average the form of capital stimulus used in the Economic Recovery Tax Act...

If object-oriented programmers are more productive than other programmers, they should be paid more, assuming that wages are determined based on the value of a worker’s marginal productivity. The human capital model is used to assess the current salary premiums of programmers who know object-oriented programming (OOP). While the human capital model employed quantifies this premium, it also cont...

Venture capital industry in Singapore is of recent origin. However, funds under management in Singapore have grown from S$ 45 million in 1983 to S$ 7300 million in 1995. These developments together with the recent announcement of government’s vision of Singapore becoming a hub for venture capital in the region, provides an opportunity for an examination of the venture capital industry in Singap...

This paper develops a theory of capital allocation in opaque financial intermediaries. The model endogenizes risk management and capital structure decisions, and it provides a simple setting within which to address questions relating to capital budgeting, performance measurement, and employee compensation. It provides a theoretical foundation for understanding the appropriate use, and misuse, o...

Introduction: One of the most important issues that managers are facing is the improvement of their staffs’ performance that could improve and increase the productivity of the organization. This study was performed with the purpose of determining the relation between social capital and the nurses’ performance in the Hospitals of Mashhad University of Medical Sciences. <st...

Health research has shown that overweight and obesity in children and adults are becoming significant public health problems in the developing world. Evidence suggests that this phenomenon is more marked in urban than rural areas and may be associated with modernization. However, the underlying reasons for this nutrition transition remain unclear. Dietary shifts, often in conjunction with incom...

A large share of the workforce throughout the developing world is self-employed, and this proportion has increased in recent decades. Assessments of this development vary, with pull factors such as high returns to capital contrasted with push factors such as barriers to more desirable salaried jobs. Using a long panel dataset from Ghana, we empirically investigate the changing structure of earn...