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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).

The purpose of this paper, starting from a theoretical framework, is to analyze the spillover effects of human capital brought by labor mobility and their influence on the public education investment.

Based on the endogenous growth theory, the paper establishes a regional human capital spillover model to examine the spillover effects of human capital coming along with the regional labor mobility and the changes of public education investment decision brought by the spillover effects in China.

It has been found that the regional mobility of labor has made the developed areas gain the spillover benefits of human capital investment from the underdeveloped areas with their superiority of social and economic environment and restrained the incentives for public education investment in the underdeveloped areas, thus the different areas walk on a different growth path, with the expansion of the difference in the economic and education investment growth.

This paper analyzes the possible influences from the spillover of human capital on the economic growth and educational investment and finds a high possibility for the underdeveloped areas to get into a “low development trap” of education investment. The key to solving the problem is to internalize the externalities by the active public policy, in order to realize equal education, rational investment and balanced development.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the effect of high‐level human capital investment, using tertiary education as the proxy, on the urban‐rural income gap in China.

Using a panel dataset covering 28 provinces of China over the period from 1988 to 2007, this paper employs Hansen's method and two‐step GMM‐SYS estimator to estimate the threshold regression model and the dynamic fixed‐effect panel model, respectively.

The urban‐rural income gap is found to be related to high‐level human capital investment in an inverted U‐shaped pattern with respect to economic development level. The estimated threshold turning point is around 20,000 RMB GDP per capita. This estimate is sufficiently robust to model specifications and variants of the dependent variable.

The authors forecast that high‐level human capital investment could play a role in bridging the urban‐rural income gap at the national level by 2014, when China's GDP per capita assumes an annual growth rate of 7.5 percent.

This, it is believed, is the first research to find an inverted U‐shaped pattern for high‐level human capital investment and urban‐rural income gap nexus in China.

The purpose of this paper is explore an organizational design that allows firms to invest in transferable strategic human capital. Strategic human capital requires considerable investment in training costs, effective compensation, opportunities for professional development and expectancy of long employment relationship within a firm. A firm can undertake investment in strategic knowledge and workers can engage in learning only in these circumstances. However, there are a number of risks that are associated with investment in strategic human capital within a firm. In this paper, the author argues that providing strategic human capital to other firms within alliances could be a strategy for leveraging resource. Strategic knowledge facilitates transactions between firms possessing co-specialized human capital and tangible resources. Organizational design of an alliance based on co-specialization allows to balance costs and returns for the human capital supplier, as well as for beneficiary and workers. Within an alliance, the human capital supplier provides workers to a beneficiary firm and coordinates their activities. Supplier specialized in human capital investment ensures improved performance, productivity and efficiency of workers. Possibility to form a greater pool of labor force and to centralize training allows optimizing cost and sharing risks associated with investment activity among alliance participants. Human resource practices in an alliance system foster long-term employment relationship. Entering an alliance increases number of job positions, professional development opportunities through horizontal mobility, promotion and learning opportunities for workers. Finally, alliances allow leveraging investment in human capital beyond a single organization.

This paper conceptualizes the use of alliance based on co-specialization as a strategy to optimize investment in strategic human capital resource. It draws upon the resource-based view (Barney, 1991; Wernerfelt, 1995) and transaction cost theory (Coase, 1937; Williamson, 1981) to examine an alliance as a strategy for leveraging the human capital resources for accessing new markets, building reputation and sharing the risks across more than one organization.

First, the paper reviews the theoretical literature on human capital as a strategic resource (Becker, 1962; Coff, 1997), its sourcing on internal and external labor markets and respective employment systems (Delery and Doty, 1996; Doeringer and Piore, 1971). Second, it focuses on the features of human capital resource (Barney, 1986; Chi, 1994; Doz and Hamel, 1998). Third, it conceptualizes the use of alliances based on co-specialization as organizational structures for investment in human capital across organizations and examines respective employment system and HR practices (Delery and Doty, 1996; Doeringer and Piore, 1971). As result, the author argues that an alliance can be an alternative mean to optimize returns on investment in human capital with strategic transferable knowledge. By consequence, the author describes an alliance employment system and illustrates the arguments with a case of human capital trading in a co-specialization alliance under a long-term management contract in the luxury hotel industry.

This paper discusses collaborative ventures as a sourcing strategy of the human capital. An alliance strategy is relevant for sourcing the strategic human capital resources. Human capital resource can be accessed by firms through transfer of skills and organizational routines within collaborative agreements, such as alliances based on co-specialization. In this case, alliance is an organizational architecture between organizations that improves the efficiency and productivity, reduces marginal cost on training due to larger scale of operations and reduces risk by splitting investment in human capital and by offering more career and development opportunities for strategic knowledge workers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the impact of human capital development in organizations. It is based on some conceptual aspects of human resource accounting and considers how investments in the development of human capital can be measured in order to investigate the financial returns for organizations.

The study is exploratory in nature as this is the first of its kind in the Pakistani manufacturing sector. The technique of convenience sampling was used to collect the data due to time and resource limitations. The sample comprises of 30 leading companies in the Pakistani textile sector. A self‐administered postal questionnaire was designed for the research survey. The results focus on the benefits derived by using the capital investment appraisal techniques of human resource accounting including: return on investment, benefit to cost ratio, weighted average cost of capital, and bottom line evaluations.

The results provide evidence of an association between investment in the development of human capital and the benefits, which organizations can reap from such investments. It further finds that the organizations investing in training and development programs provide high employee productivity that ultimately contributes towards high‐organizational performance.

Owing to the research design, the results may exhibit a lack of generalizability to other sectors. As the results cannot be applied to other organizations, further research can be done by using the same techniques.

This paper is a groundbreaking work in Pakistan and thereby an addition to the existing global literature on human resource accounting. This research provides new directions for the literature in this area, by encouraging a debate about the importance of investing in the development of human capital.

This paper aims to clarify the factors that affect the formation of organizational human capital competitive advantage (OHCCA) and construct its structural dimensions.

This research method adopted grounded theory using 20 interviews of managers from 10 companies. Relevant literature was reviewed to conduct open coding, Axial coding and selective coding to ensure OHCCA concept and dimensions.

Studies have shown that OHCCA formation of results from investment and collaboration of three levels: organization, teams and departments and employees. OHCCA formation is composed of three dimensions of organizational human capital investment: planning, practice and stock.

This research enriches the organizational human capital and competitive advantage theories.

The practical significance is to provide theoretical and practical guidance for organizations in creating OHCCAs.

This research is the first to propose and define the OHCCA concept and construct a three-dimensional structure model. Furthermore, this research has revealed the leading factors that affect OHCCA's formation process.

Over the past three years Accenture developed and applied a new measurement tool that assesses the maturity of an organization's human capital development processes, benchmarks the processes' performance against other organizations, and determines the relationship of each process to bottom line business results. It is designed to help executives make significantly more informed choices about their investments in human capital. This article aims to look at this tool.

The tool, known as the human capital development framework, now has been tested in more than 60 organizations. This case describes how one organization used it to help turn around a struggling division.

Results of the initial implementations of the framework suggest that financial performance improves as a company improves its scoring in those critical human capital processes with strong relationships to financial success. As an organization moves from one benchmarking quartile to the next in these processes within the framework scoring, its capital efficiency – or the ratio of total annual sales to the capital invested in the operations of the business by shareholders and creditors – improves from 10 to 15 percent.

The framework outlined in this article provides a tool that enables company leaders to make clear‐eyed assessments of the payoff from human capital investments. It helps organizations diagnose their strengths and weaknesses in key human capital practices, to set investment priorities and track performance, and to establish an empirical link between human capital investments, business practices, and overall business performance.

Those organizations in the study with more mature human capital processes have better financial performance than those organizations with less mature processes. Specifically, those organizations that focus on processes devoted to three key areas – creating a people strategy aligned with the business strategy, providing supportive work environments, and developing employees by giving them ample opportunities to learn and grow – achieve far greater economic success than those that do not.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the effect of investments in organisational resources and corporate governance features on market-based performance of Islamic banks (IBs).

The required data to calculate different constituents of banks’ investment strategies and governance mechanism were hand collected from 268 annual reports. Different regression models were used to determine the impact of investment in human and structural capital and corporate governance features on market performance of IBs.

The paper finds that investments in knowledge resources (human capital, in particular) have a significantly positive impact on the market value of IBs. The results further reveal that IBs’ strategy to rely on long-term human capital accumulation can be seen as idiosyncratic problem-solving knowledge capital. Based on market measure, the paper finds role duality to have a significant positive impact and the size of the advisory board to have the opposite effect on market value.

This study includes IBs only and ignores other Islamic financial services providers such as Takaful (insurance) companies. The study leaves this chasm to be filled by future researchers.

The findings may serve as a useful input for both Islamic bankers and regulators to apply knowledge management in their institutions. Furthermore, the dominant role of human capital also provides insight to managers with respect to business performance levers.

The main contribution of this paper is to provide insight into the Islamic banking business model using a unique hand-collected data set, to identify the effect of investments in organisational resources and bank governance on market value in before, during and after financial crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between training and development investment and financial performance over time. Human capital literature suggests that training and development investment may not immediately affect financial performance but may instead create effects that are realized over time. However, most existing cross-sectional research explores the influence of training and development investment on performance while overlooking training and development investment’s long-term effects.

This study focuses on the recovery period following the Great Recession circa 2008 in the South Korean business context. Longitudinal data from 312 firms, including four distinct waves, were used. Latent growth modeling was used to help identify a pattern of reciprocal relationships between training and development investment and financial performance over time.

The results indicate that even though growth in training and development investment is stable over time, there are significant between-firm differences in training and development investment trajectories over time. Prior financial performance was shown to be positively related to higher levels of training and development investment, but it was not related to growth in training and development investment. The initial level of training and development investment did not predict subsequent profit, but growth in training and development investment was positively related to future financial performance.

This study suggests that as an organization’s training and development investment increases over time, a delayed effect on financial performance may emerge because of this accumulated investment. Ultimately, the results highlight the importance of having a stock of human capital, rather than concentrating upon momentary flows that yield immediate effects.