Purpose: This paper explores the economic and social effects of human capital investment in the 20th century. As well as drawing on census data and statistical yearbooks in Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand, the paper develops its argument by an intersection of scholarly work in sociology, economics and the history of education to consider the…

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to replicate the IALS-based analysis by Coulombe, Tremblay and Marchand (2004) as well as Coulombe and Tremblay (2006) based on more recent and more comprehensive data on the literacy skills of the adult population. Results from panel estimations over the period 1970-2010…

Purpose: English language skills have great influence on labors' earnings from the global perspective. To reveal the economic returns to English language ability in Chinese labor market, we investigate how the global English test certificate affects college graduates' wage. Design/Approach/Methods: We adopt the ordinary least squares (OLS) and…

For a future faculty member the choice of which graduate programme and institution to attend is considered to have important implications for securing academic employment, developing skills to succeed in academia, and yielding positive returns on investment of time and money in education. Yet does it matter where a faculty member attends graduate…

This chapter discusses the relationship between the labour market and vocational education and training in England. For decades British governments have emphasised the need for more people to stay longer in the formal education system and at the same time have attempted to improve work-based training. They have also emphasised the centrality of…

In Baldino and Cabral (2013) we introduced the concept of qualified labour-power as the commodity produced by the school system. In the present article we outline a quantitative model to evaluate the profit rate of educational programmes. We compare a medical school programme with a teacher education programme at a public university in Brazil,…

Human capital investment is a necessary condition for improving labour market outcomes in most countries. Empirical studies to investigate human capital and its linkages on the labour demand side are, however, relatively scarce due to limitations of firm-level data-sets. Using firm-level data from the Thai manufacturing sector, this paper aims to…

Data, while imprecise, suggest that some states are producing far more new teachers at the elementary level than will be able to find jobs in their respective states--even as districts struggle to find enough recruits in other certification fields. For some observers, the imbalances reflect a failure of teacher colleges--by far, the largest source…

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the link between age and proficiency in information-processing skills, based on information drawn from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The data reveal significant age-related differences in proficiencies, strongly suggesting that proficiency tends to "naturally" decline with age. Age…

The Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program is growing at an unsustainable pace. Over the past 40 years the number of disabled worker beneficiaries has increased nearly sixfold, rising from 1.5 million in 1970 to 8.2 million in 2010. Rapid growth in the rolls has put increasing pressure on program finances. The rapid rise in SSDI…

Several recent studies across the social sciences show that the spatial agglomeration of employment in a local labor market benefits both firms and workers in terms of better firm performance and higher wages. Drawing from the organizational ecology perspective, we argue that workers receive higher wages in large industrial clusters and urban…

Chicago has a dynamic history of embracing change, evolving from an agricultural and commercial hub to the steel powerhouse that would undergird America's industrial revolution. The "City of Big Shoulders" now bears a sizeable burden, one that again requires it to embrace change. The metro area must shift to an economy built on knowledge…

"Research Messages 2014" is a collection of summaries of research published by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) in 2014 in the context of changing economic, industrial, social and education conditions, organised under the following broad categories: (1) Productivity: to sustain and build Australia's human…

"Research messages 2011" is a collection of summaries of research projects published by National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) in 2011. The publication also has an overview essay that captures the themes and highlights from the research for the year, including: (1) the initial education and training of young people and…

This paper examines the effects of expansions in higher educational institutions and the medical service industry on the economic development of a metropolitan area. This examination pulls together previous research and provides some new empirical evidence. We provide quantitative evidence of the magnitude of economic effects of higher education…