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Register a new userDynamic complementarity in skill production: Evidence from genetic endowments and birth order
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The birth order literature emphasizes the role of parental investments in explaining why firstborns have higher human capital outcomes than their laterborn siblings. We use birth order as a proxy for investments and interact it with genetic endowments. Exploiting only within-family variation in both ensures they are exogenous as well as orthogonal to each other. As such, our setting is informative about the existence of dynamic complementarity in skill production. Our empirical analysis exploits data from 15,019 full siblings in the UK Biobank. We adopt a family-fixed effects strategy combined with instrumental variables to deal with endogeneity issues arising from omitted variables and measurement error. We find that birth order and genetic endowments interact: those with above-average genetic endowments benefit disproportionally more from being firstborn compared to those with below-average genetic endowments. This finding is a clean example of how genetic endowments (nature) and the environment (nurture) interact in producing educational attainment. Moreover, our results are consistent with the existence of dynamic complementarity in skill formation: additional parental investments associated with being firstborn are more effective for those siblings who randomly inherited higher genetic endowments for educational attainment.
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China is the worlds second largest economy. After four decades of economic miracles, Chinas economy is transitioning into an advanced, knowledge-based economy. Yet, we still lack a detailed understanding of the skills that underly the Chinese labor force, and the development and spatial distribution of these skills. For example, the US standardized skill taxonomy O*NET played an important role in understanding the dynamics of manufacturing and knowledge-based work, as well as potential risks from automation and outsourcing. Here, we use Machine Learning techniques to bridge this gap, creating Chinas first workforce skill taxonomy, and map it to O*NET. This enables us to reveal workforce skill polarization into social-cognitive skills and sensory-physical skills, and to explore the Chinas regional inequality in light of workforce skills, and compare it to traditional metrics such as education. We build an online tool for the public and policy makers to explore the skill taxonomy: skills.sysu.edu.cn. We will also make the taxonomy dataset publicly available for other researchers upon publication.
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Livestock industries are vulnerable to disease threats, which can cost billions of dollars and have substantial negative social ramifications. Losses are mitigated through increased use of disease-related biosecurity practices, making increased biosecurity an industry goal. Currently, there is no industry-wide standard for sharing information about disease incidence or on-site biosecurity strategies, resulting in uncertainty regarding disease prevalence and biosecurity strategies employed by industry stakeholders. Using an experimental simulation game, we examined human participants willingness to invest in biosecurity when confronted with disease outbreak scenarios. We varied the scenarios by changing the information provided about 1) disease incidence and 2) biosecurity strategy or response by production facilities to the threat of disease. Here we show that willingness to invest in biosecurity increases with increased information about disease incidence, but decreases with increased information about biosecurity practices used by nearby facilities. Thus, the type or context of the uncertainty confronting the decision maker may be a major factor influencing behavior. Our findings suggest that policies and practices that encourage greater sharing of disease incidence information should have the greatest benefit for protecting herd health.
This paper studies the extent to which social capital drives performance in the Chinese venture capital market and explores the trend toward VC syndication in China. First, we propose a hybrid model based on syndicated social networks and the latent-variable model, which describes the social capital at venture capital firms and builds relationships between social capital and performance at VC firms. Then, we build three hypotheses about the relationships and test the hypotheses using our proposed model. Some numerical simulations are given to support the test results. Finally, we show that the correlations between social capital and financial performance at venture capital firms are weak in China and find that Chinas venture capital firms lack mature social capital links.
The study examines the relationship between mobile financial services and individual financial behavior in India wherein a sizeable population is yet to be financially included. Addressing the endogeneity associated with the use of mobile financial services using an instrumental variable method, the study finds that the use of mobile financial services increases the likelihood of investment, having insurance and borrowing from formal financial institutions. Further, the analysis highlights that access to mobile financial services have the potential to bridge the gender divide in financial inclusion. Fastening the pace of access to mobile financial services may partially alter pandemic induced poverty.
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