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The purpose of this study is to analyze the influence of social capital on human capital; the effect of social capital on transaction costs; the influence of social capital, human capital and transaction costs on empowerment; the indirect effect of social capital on empowerment through human capital; and the indirect effect of social capital on empowerment through transaction costs in Bangli Regency.

The population in this research is all wood carving business in Bangli Regency, in all districts some 366 business units. The number of respondents surveyed were 191 business units in all sub-districts. The sampling technique used is stratified random sampling, with strata of business area. Inferential analysis is preceded by using factor analysis techniques to obtain factor scores on each latent variable, followed by path analysis to answer the research objectives.

Based on the analysis, the following conclusions are drawn: social capital has a positive and significant impact on human resources; positive social capital and significant positive to transaction costs; social capital and human resources have a positive and significant effect while transaction costs and no significant positive effect on empowerment; human resources partially mediate the influence of social capital on empowerment; and transaction costs do not act as a variable, mediating the influence of social capital on empowering small woodcraft industry in Bangli Regency.

This study is one of the few to investigate the role of social capital, human capital and transaction cost on empowerment of small industries, especially wood carving in Bangli District. This small woodcraft industry is famous for its uniqueness that characterizes Balinese carving ornaments. But lately, the productivity of handicrafts wood carving, especially in Bangli District, fluctuates tend to decline. Social capital, in addition to human capital and technology, also plays an important role in the production process. Social capital equals other physical capital and can increase productivity and economic efficiency. Higher social capital owned by individuals or groups can reduce transaction costs; thus economic activity can run efficiently. Social capital is the information, trust and norms of reciprocity inherent in social networks.

This paper aims to investigate the critical aspect of financial development, human capital and their interactive term on economic growth from the perspective of emerging economies.

Data set ranged from 2002 to 2017 of 83 emerging countries used in this research and collected from world development indicators of the World Bank. The two-step system generalized method of moments is used to conduct this research within the endogenous growth model while controlling time and country-specific effects.

The findings of the study indicate that financial development has a positive and significant effect on economic growth. In emerging countries, human capital also has a positive impact on economic growth. Financial development and human capital interactively affect economic growth for emerging economies positively and significantly.

The data set is limited to 83 emerging countries of the world. The time period for the study is 2002 to 2017.

This research contributes to the existing literature on human capital, financial development and economic growth. Limited research has been conducted on the impact of financial development and human capital on economic growth.

This paper aims to investigate the interplay between international migration, soft skills and job and life satisfaction after returns.

The paper uses the dataset of Human Capital in Poland 2010–2014 representative surveys with 4040 return migrants, who worked temporarily abroad and returned to an origin in comparison with almost 70,000 stayers, who never worked abroad. In this study, Poland is treated as a strategic research site for the labor migration processes, which happened after the biggest European Union enlargement in 2004.

This study discovered that working abroad had a positive relation with cognitive, intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies, as well as job and life satisfaction. However, the relations differ depending on the key destination country.

This study discusses the implications for future research and practice, offering recommendations to organizations on how to embed employees with these resources in companies and how to support return migrants and their potential employers with the use of migratory informal human capital in personnel management and counseling.

This paper brings quantitative arguments about the hidden impacts of international migration on human capital by uniquely comparing the migrant population with the non-migrant population.

This paper aims to depart from the premise that human capital investments and human capital outcomes are often tacit – an aspect, which is often neglected in the current literature on entrepreneurial human capital. The idea of this conceptual paper is to shed light on the social process of how human capital investments and human capital outcomes can be valued and made visible through the validation of prior learning. Thus, this study conceptualises the validation of prior learning as a post hoc, the reflective process through which an aspiring entrepreneur is guided.

This paper is conceptual and introduces a process model.

Findings indicate that the process of the validation of prior learning is well-suitable to inform aspiring entrepreneurs of their investments into human capital and their human capital outcomes. The process results in a (partial) certified qualification that provides entrepreneurial legitimacy.

Thus far, the model is conceptual and should be validated via interviews and further empirical studies in the field.

Literature in the field of entrepreneurial human capital suggests that human capital outcomes are more important for success than inputs. Furthermore, context-specific knowledge, skills and abilities are more important than generalised outcomes. These findings have implications for the design of validation procedures.

Human capital has only been recently conceptualised as consisting of human capital investments and outcomes of human capital investment. However, thus far the literature falls short in acknowledging the tacit nature of human capital investments and human capital outcomes. This paper contributes a structured process of how human capital investments and human capital outcomes are linked and assessed. In so doing, this study extends a recent model of human capital investments and outputs (Marvel et al., 2016, p. 616).

Despite the global resolves to curtail fossil fuel consumption (FFC) in favour of clean energies, several countries continue to rely on carbon-intensive sources in meeting their energy demands. Financial constraints and limited knowledge with regards to green energy sources constitute major setbacks to the energy transition process. This study therefore aims to examine the effects of financial development and human capital on energy consumption.

The empirical analysis is based on the system generalised method of moments (SGMM) for a panel of 134 countries from 1996 to 2019. The SGMM estimates conducted on the basis of three measures of energy consumption, notably fossil fuel, renewable energy as well as total energy consumption (TEC), provide divergent results.

While financial development significantly reduces FFC, its effect is positive though non-significant with regards to renewable energy consumption. Conversely, financial development has a positive and significant effect on TEC. Moreover, the results reveal that human capital development has an enhancing though non-significant effect on the energy transition process. In addition, the results reveal that resource rents have an enhancing effect on the energy transition process. However, when natural resources rents are disaggregated into various components (oil, coal, mineral, natural gas and forest rents), the effects on energy transition are divergent. Although our findings are consistent when the global panel is split into developed and developing economies, the results are divergent across geographical regions. Contingent on these findings, actionable policy implications are discussed.

The study complements extant literature by assessing nexuses between financial development, human capital and energy transition from a global perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether income diversification moderates the relationship between human capital and bank performance.

The study uses a sample of 53 banks and panel data for the years 2010–2018. The hypotheses are tested through hierarchical multiple regression and the choice between fixed effect and random effect estimation is based on the results of the Hausman test.

The study finds that human capital and income diversification significantly influence bank performance; however, the direction of the causality varies. While human capital has a positive effect, income diversification has a negative effect. Additionally, the interaction term has a negative and significant effect on bank performance, inferring that income diversification has an antagonistic effect on the human capital and bank performance relationship. For the control variable, liquidity and asset quality negatively affects bank performance while capitalization has a positive effect.

Human capital was measured as human capital efficiency (HCE), which is a quantitative measure of human capital, hence future studies can use qualitative measures. Also, the study focused on commercial banks in East Africa, future researcher may possibly consider other regions and industries, which would shed more insights.

The results of this paper provide valuable insights. Bank managers can get a better understanding of the impact of human capital on bank performance, and the need to invest more in human capital development. Further, the study cautions bank managers that engaging in non-lending activities might destroy the economic value of human capital and ultimately lower performance. The study also recommends that policymakers should address the obstacles to banks' income diversification, for instance relaxing regulations restricting diversification; this might enable banks to leverage related financial service activities for optimal utilization of human capital and improve banks' profitability.

While a good number of previous studies investigated the direct effect of human capital and income diversification on the performance of banks, this study examines the moderating role of income diversification on the relationship between human capital and performance of banks in East Africa.

As a consequence of global changes, the landscape of immigration is changing. This brings opportunities for researching more nuanced aspects related to immigrant entrepreneurship in new contexts. The purpose of this paper is to establish the extent to which Africa-to-African immigrants leverage their social capital and human capital towards improving the success of their entrepreneurial ventures.

First-generation immigrant entrepreneurs within the Johannesburg area in South Africa were surveyed (n = 230). Instrument validity and reliability was first established, and then the hypotheses were tested using multiple regression analyses.

Hypotheses are supported insofar African immigrant entrepreneurs in South Africa rely on their structural and resource-related dimensions of social capital to achieve entrepreneurial success. Furthermore, human capital in terms of both work experience and entrepreneurial experience was found to be a significant predictor of entrepreneurial success.

There is value in developing policies that promote African immigrant entrepreneurs with higher levels of human and social capital. These African immigrants have the potential to increase the national skills base and knowledge required for successful entrepreneurship development in South Africa.

While both human capital and social capital have been associated significantly with the generic entrepreneurship literature, this paper provides an empirical contribution by focusing on the relevance of these constructs in the context of immigrant entrepreneurship from an African emerging market perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between intellectual capital and organizational innovation in Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) through a case study at KPC on the employees of the corporation (The study population was 2,180 respondents and the sample size was 335 respondents).

The statistical package for social science was used to analyze the data. While trying to explore the relationship between intellectual capital and innovation, the researcher used the descriptive analytical method and the case study methodology using various references, periodicals, internal and external documents and data, in addition to conducting a field study on a sample of employees of KPC, through a questionnaire form containing the axes that reflect the study variables.

There is a relative approval between the sample of the research on the existence of a good role for training in the corporation in terms of availability for all employees and the compatibility of training programs with the actual needs of employees, and linking the training paths and career paths for promotions in the corporation. The researcher attributed this to the employees' awareness to the importance of training and its role in raising their performance levels, and the awareness of the corporation to the importance of training and capacity building of the human element.

The research, in general, demonstrated the importance of human capital as the organization's most valuable assets, especially as it supports creativity and innovation, thus enabling competitiveness. The research stressed that human capital is the most important element in the formation of intellectual capital, which requires decision-makers to support it and give the intellectual and human aspects a strategic content that meets the needs to develop innovation and institutional education and to recruit systems and indicators to measure the performance objectively to achieve the goal of survival of the corporation in a competitive sustainable environment, through providing material and moral potentials that can support the implementation of organizational innovation at various levels.

This paper adopts an intellectual capital perspective to investigate the role of owners who are ethnic minorities in the foreign market expansion performance of SMEs, and in particular considers the human capital dimension of intellectual capital.

Based on the empirical investigation of a sample of 10,326 small- and medium-sized US high-tech manufacturing enterprises, the authors’ results reveal a positive relationship between the number of foreign markets where these SMEs operate and their financial performance, and that this effect is reinforced by the presence of ethnic minority owners, as ethnic minorities constitute a valuable source of intellectual capital which bring value to firms.

The authors’ findings reveal the importance of intellectual capital in an SME’s leadership position, specifically in terms of having individuals from normally disadvantaged groups as owners. In this sense, policymakers are crucial in supporting the inclusion of ethnic minorities in SME ownership, through advantageous treatment in firms, for example.

The study presents practical implications for managers seeking foreign market expansion. In addition, when defining ownership structure (e.g., in the start-up phase), the role of human capital, in the form of ethnic minorities, should not be neglected, especially if an SME intends to operate or is already operating in different national contexts.

The authors’ results provide important insights into the positive effect of human capital on SME foreign market performance. The idea of a moderating role played by owners from ethnic minorities suggested here contributes to the literature on human capital and is one of the first attempts to consider this moderating factor in this relationship, especially in the SME context.

Human capital flight from Nigeria to developed countries has remained a topical issue. This paper aims to empirically analyze the push factors for the migrants who explore the various legal migrant schemes from a macro perspective. The authors examine human capital development and its role in contributing to human capital flight to more developed counties.

This paper is anchored on the push–pull model. Using secondary data from 1990 to 2019, the authors look at the relationship between human capital flight and variables such as life expectancy, infant mortality rate, population growth rate and Nigeria’s unemployment rate. The auto-regressive lag model (ARDL) was adopted to estimate the empirical relationship among these variables.

The results from the ARDL model suggest a positive relationship exists between population growth rate and migration rate. A negative relationship was, however, observed between life expectancy and migration rate. This study also found that an increase in the infant mortality rate negatively impacted migration significantly. Therefore, an increase in infant mortality rate lowered the migration rate. Finally, an increase in the unemployment rate increased migration; however, insignificantly.

The findings from this study are limited to the push factors influencing migration out of Nigeria. These factors are also restricted to variables for which data can be derived under the study’s scope. The results of this study have far-reaching implications, especially for policymakers and citizens alike. Better human capital development through enhanced life expectancy and reduced population in Nigeria will reduce the migration rate. Therefore, this study calls for the doubling of developmental and infrastructural efforts at all levels of governance.

This paper’s importance lies in its ability to elucidate push factors that influenced migration out of Nigeria empirically. An empirical approach to the subject matter will explain these factors and the degree to which they influence migration. This will guide the policy-making process in curbing brain drain, which is a major challenge in Nigeria.