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Firms are the primary producers of innovations, and understanding how these agents acquire, update and manage the knowledge of their employees is central to understanding economic growth. However, in developing economies, technology adaptation plays a critical role in innovation compared to knowledge creation. Thus, this research investigates the role of human capital in innovation at the firm level in the case of a small developing economy, which ranks highly on several human capital dimensions but shows declining levels of investment in advanced human capital development in its manufacturing sector.

This research examines the relationship between innovation and human capital at the firm level in a small peripheral economy. The human capital theory is applied to a firm context to understand variations in innovative behavior depending on the size of manufacturing companies. The effect of several human capital dimensions on product innovation is estimated by applying binomial logistic regression models with firm and time-fixed effects.

This article contributes to innovation economics and public policy by highlighting that not all dimensions of human capital operate similarly for all companies in the context of developing economies. In such settings, technology adaptation plays a critical role in innovation. While employees' human capital endowments significantly impact small firms in that context, firm-level practices such as internal training are crucial for large companies. Consequently, policymakers should consider that firms' human capital endowments impact their innovative behavior differently to avoid one-size-fits-all policy design approaches in this regard.

Prior research on the relationship between human capital and innovation in developing economies was based on a cross-sectional approach. This research's unique panel dataset covering 11-year triennial innovation surveys enabled a modeling strategy that controls for time-invariant unobservable firm characteristics. Three aspects of firms' human capital have been analyzed human capital endowments, internal training and human resource management (HRM) practices for the first time longitudinally in a developing economy, enabling to contrast of empirical findings with policy design.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the wage gap between men and women who seek self-employment in Brazil, whether because they want to become entrepreneurs out of necessity or because of the flexible hours.

The data used are from the 2015 National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) and the methods are the ordinary least squares (OLS) for the Mean and the unconditional quantile regression (RIF-regression) for the distribution of gains of both genders, both associated with the Oaxaca–Ransom decomposition in order to separate the differential between the part explained by attributes and the unexplained part.

The main results show that women earn less than men in the mean and throughout the distribution. The average difference is 27.79%, varying between 19.24 and 48.26% in the distribution. The inclusion of occupational variables shows that the glass door phenomenon exists even in self-employment, that is, women choose occupations with lower incomes.

Stimulating self-employment has been an alternative policy for the insertion of women in the labor market. This is the first study on the wage gap in self-employment in the Brazilian labor market. The presence of wage differentials among self-employed men and women throughout the distribution may point to the need for specific policies that not only target the mean. These policies would be related to sticky floor and to the glass ceiling. Another potential problem concerns the so-called glass door–women access the labor market via professions that pay less, otherwise, the problem points to occupational segregation against women.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-05-2019-0312