The concepts of absorptive capacity and innovative capability have been introduced to describe abilities of a country to imitate and, accordingly, to create more advanced technologies. In this paper we suggest new indicators of these two abilities. To calculate them, we develop an endogenous...

In Bulgaria, during the transition to market-oriented economy, many analyzes are based on the widely held view that one of the positive legacies of the economies in transition (particularly that of Bulgaria) is the high level of human capital. The high degree of development of education and...

The question: “How much of biological evolution based theories, as they are understood presently, apply to human behaviour?” is highly controversial and perhaps highly politicized as well. The inference that human beings are evolutionarily programmed to have urges toward aggression, rape,...

High school baseball is very popular in Japan. All games of the high school baseball tournaments are publicly broadcasted. This paper hypothesizes that high school baseball influences the happiness level of the Japanese. Individual level data in Japan was used to test this hypothesis. The key...

The paper assesses the causal relationship between formal volunteering and individual health. The econometric analysis employs data provided by the Income and Living Conditions Survey for the United Kingdom carried out by the European Union’s Statistics (UK-SILC) in 2006. Based on 2SLS,...

The determinants of human capital have been studied sparsely in the literature. Although there is a huge literature on the determinants of schooling linked with the quality of schooling, there are not many contributions that explore the deep determinants of investment in, quantity and quality of...

We study the cultural process through which a society inculcates an entrepreneurial spirit. People work for a guaranteed wage or operate a firm whose return depends on business expertise. The latter is culturally acquired, within the family or outside, and people may choose an occupation...

It is widely and increasingly acknowledged that social capital plays a crucial role in the economic performance, which covers various facets of　human behavior. A growing body of literature has sought to investigate the role of social capital mainly in heterogeneous societies such as USA,...

This study examines sources of Australian labour productivity change from 1950 to 1994. Time-series data are used to estimate a model capturing the interaction between labour productivity, fixed capital, human capital, telecommunications, trade openness and international competitiveness....

The issue of institutional support for innovations in Latin American countries has been examined in this paper. We use aprirori theoretical knowledge on this issue in order to derive one econometric model out of a theoretical framework. The influence on human capital variable on innovations...