Search results

The article describes the constraints of the current system for accounting for the value and importance of an organization’s human capital. It describes the Human Capital Capability Scorecard (HCCS), which allows for better valuation of human capital, and examines the implementation of that HCCS system inside diverse organizations, and analyzes the relationship between human capital indices and organizational outcomes. The article describes the composition of five human capital indices, and examines their relationship to key organizational outcomes in a manufacturing firm, public school district, and consortium of banks and finds that human capital indices are positively related to a variety of organizational outcomes, including sales office effectiveness, student achievement test scores, and summary financial measures such as net income per employee. Future research should focus on the application of standard measures of human capital across additional organizations, and seek to more fully explore the effects of specific human capital items. The article suggests that organizations should devote significantly more attention to measuring their human capital in a way that recognizes its value, and that reporting such information publicly will help publicly traded organizations to avoid the too‐common short‐term focus on quarterly earnings. New quantitative evidence is provided to executives about the importance of human capital and methods for human capital and people‐related factors to be more appropriately measured, valued, and reported by organizations are suggeted.

Affordable and clean energy as well as regulation and decrease in emissions are in the heart of sustainable development goals. In order to achieve these goals, cleaner technologies together with responsible consumption and production need to be adopted. Therefore, the knowledge, skills and habits – the human capital and increased awareness of its importance, play an important role. The relationship between sustainability and human capital has been addressed only recently. There had been two streams of literature, investigating either (i) the relationship of human capital and the economic growth, or (ii) the nexus of economic growth and sustainability, without realizing the interconnectedness of these concepts. In this chapter, the authors add contribution to this scarce, yet growing body of literature by investigating the relationship between human capital (measured by Index of human capital) and two measures of sustainability: electricity use and CO₂ emissions for a panel of European Union Member States. The authors show that the increase in human capital is associated with the decrease in energy consumption and CO₂ emissions and therefore is associated with the increase in sustainability. This chapter bears important policy implications since it shows that the human capital, its stock and quality, should be included in the sustainability discussions and is important for achieving the sustainability goals.

Real gross domestic product (GDP) growth for Mauritius has averaged more than 5 per cent since 1970 and GDP per capita has increased more than tenfold between 1970 and 2012, from less than $500 to more than $9,000. It has often been reported that human capital, along with other growth enablers, has played an important role in this development. The purpose of this paper is to study this nexus.

A human capital augmented Cobb-Douglas production function is used, where output is also a function of capital and labour. One of the innovations of the present paper is the use of a composite index to proxy human capital. The authors investigate the impact of human capital on economic growth in a dynamic vector error correction modelling (VECM) framework.

The general results here show that stock, labour and human capital are all significant growth determinants, with human capital having a long-run output elasticity of 0.36. The VECM results generally validated the long-run output elasticity, although a relatively lower elasticity of 0.1 is obtained. Both sets of results tend to point to the fact that human capital has significantly contributed to economic growth in Mauritius.

The current paper paves the way for future work, which can build on the composite HCI developed here and aggregate it with relevant variables representing tertiary education and training, to better analyze and further understand the role of human capital on economic growth in Mauritius.

Here, the authors posit that human capital is an aggregate of health, education and nutrition, and the authors use a composite index along with other contributing factors to study its impact on economic growth, within a VECM framework.

A very few studies have been conducted to measure a degree of national intellectual capital for selected groups of countries. This paper is conducted to construct a new index of national intellectual capital (INIC) which is simple, quantifiable, relevant and comparable for countries around the globe.

The styudy’s new INIC uses various indicators which are proxies for fundamental aspects of intellectual capital, including (1) human capital, (2) structural capital and (3) relational capital. These indicators are publicly available for many countries. The principal component analysis is utilized to derive the INIC. Various tests have also been conducted to ensure that the new index is appropriate and fit for purpose.

Findings from this paper confirm that the new INIC has a strong correlation of 0.80 with an index developed by Lin et al. (2014) (the LECB index), an advanced INIC to date. The LECB index has been infrequently updated and covered selected countries due to data and information unavailability. In addition, the study’s tests indicate that a high correlation of 0.75 is observed between the study’s index and GDP per capita. The new INIC represents an advancement in relation to its simplicity, quantification, relevance and international comparison across nations.

The estimates of national intellectual capital using the approach in this study will open a new strand of theoretical and empirical studies in relation to national intellectual capital and other economic and social issues of interests. This novel and innovative approach will provide policymakers with a valuable framework to formulate and implement relevant policies to enhance and improve national intellectual capital.

To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first study of its type, which is conducted to measure national intellectual capital based on publicly available data. Required data cover an extended period of years and a majority of countries. As such, an INIC will enhance transparency and feasibility for international comparison across countries.

The purpose if this paper is to investigate the determinants of corporate disclosure on human resources.

The paper examines the extent to which 105 Spanish listed companies present information about human resources in their annual report. It distinguishes information about human capital, which includes the items about human resources usually integrated in intellectual capital, and social and ethical aspects of information about employees. A content analysis of 105 companies' annual reports was conducted. Once the information was quantified, using a regression analysis the influence certain company characteristics have on this disclosure was examined.

The results confirm the impact of variables like size, type of industry and property concentration on human resource disclosure.

The disclosure of the most competitive companies suggests that they are more concerned about employees' welfare than the rest. This may motivate a change of the disclosure policy of the rest of the firms who may follow the behavior of the most competitive ones.

Content analysis has been carried out in some papers referring to human capital disclosure but with a descriptive character. In addition, considering different types of information about employees will permit the observation of the existence of any difference in the determinants depending on the users of this disclosure: shareholders or stakeholders (more concerned about social matters). Furthermore, using a variable to distinguish competitive companies from the rest has allowed us to see what human resources issues are relevant for competitive businesses.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of human resource disclosure on corporate image.

The information about human resources presented in their annual reports by 105 Spanish listed companies was grouped in three categories, previously defined in literature. We distinguish information about human capital (items usually included as human capital in Intellectual Capital reports), social information about employees and information about ethics questions relative to employees. A content analysis of these 105 annual reports was conducted to measure human resource disclosure and a regression analysis was carried out to study the impact of this information on company image.

The findings reflect the significant effect of the three categories of human resource disclosure on corporate image.

This study might encourage firms to improve their disclosure policy on issues related to human capital, such as training, and on social and ethical aspects of employees, such as health and safety at work and working rights.

This paper contributes to research on human resources by confirming the impact not only of information about human capital, which is mainly oriented to shareholders, but of social and ethical information about employees, oriented as well as to stakeholders, on corporate reputation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if human capital information voluntarily provided by German companies is value‐relevant.

By means of word‐based content analysis, human capital information is extracted from German companies’ annual reports. Subsequently, the value relevance of the disclosed human capital information is analyzed by applying two established valuation models.

The results show that human capital information is value‐relevant. Especially, information on qualification and competence issues is positively associated with firm value. Nonetheless, the disclosed information does not lead to short‐term changes in market value. Consequently, human capital information is value‐relevant but not immediately.

First, companies can improve their valuation on the capital market by disclosing information on their human capital. Second, standard setters can use this paper's results in defining relevant information categories for human capital disclosures. Third, the amount of human capital disclosures is increasing over time.

This study explicitly evaluates the value relevance of the overall (especially nonfinancial) human capital information voluntarily provided in corporate annual reports.

The groundwork of intellectual capital (IC) management, measuring IC, attracts much attention from academics and practitioners. The purpose of this paper is to design a measurement model and a qualitative index system of IC, so as to provide a good tool for enterprises to manage their IC. Based on a review of several IC measurement models proposed by western researchers, IC is classified into human capital, structural capital, innovation capital and customer capital, and thereupon a qualitative index system for the above four IC elements is designed through an analysis of their contents. Through an empirical study, it is found that there is a significant relationship between the scores of the four IC elements of a company and its business performance, which proves the validity and rationality of the IC measurement model and the qualitative index system. In the meantime, the empirical study further proves that there is a remarkable relationship between the four IC elements. Therefore enterprises must manage and improve their IC from an integrative perspective.

The intellectual capital of a nation (or a region of nations) requires the articulation of a system of variables that helps to uncover and manage the invisible wealth of a country. Most importantly, an emphasis on human capital allows for a better understanding of the hidden values, individuals, enterprises, institutions, and communities that are both current and potential future sources of intellectual wealth. This paper endeavours to address the five research questions. The main outcomes of this paper are the development of a national intellectual capital measurement methodology and index. The NICI is also used within a structural equation model to test several hypotheses related to national intellectual capital development.

The paper investigates how the interplay of women-specific human and social capital factors with ownership structure impacts her chances to get director level appointment in the light of recent amendments to the Indian statute.

The strength of the study lies in fitting a logistic regression model to the unique hand collected data on women director characteristics from 100 large listed Indian firms.

Counter intuitive findings reveal negative effects of social capital on appointment of independent women directors. This relationship gets reversed when social capital is moderated by ownership structure.

Companies may be influenced to take into cognizance the underlying gender biases prevailing in the highest echelons of management and employ un-gendered fair selection practices for board level appointments in order to progress towards gender balanced corporate boards.

The paper is a first of its kind that combines aspects of human capital and ownership structure using Indian data. By developing several new proxy variables to enrich the construct of social capital it contributes to the corporate governance literature and lastly, through main and interaction effects, the paper offers a deeper understanding about the impact of endogenous factors of corporate boards on women's representation at leadership levels in India.