I began looking for a topic in my area of interest, and one that I am already familiar with: human capital. I wasn't entirely sure what exactly I had wanted to do, but education attainment had always interested me. Also, in the past I did a simple study of comparing the number of pregnancies by female employees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics jobs against teaching using a human capital framework. The data set I had used for this was the NLSY 79 cohort. I then began wondering what might happen when an individual's human capital was very specific. If their human capital was firm-specific and there current employment was terminated (for economic reasons), might we expect them to take longer to find a new job than those without firm-specific capital? Also, do years of schooling play a factor? I would suspect that firm-specific capital and several years of education would be correlated with a longer amount of time between a worker's first and second job.
The most important thing that I need to do is a more thorough review of the literature. Specifically, I need to see if past research looked at firm-specific capital, their conclusions, and what variables they used. Also, while the NLSY does report the time between first and second jobs, along with years of education and tenure at the first job, I need to determine whether there are any variables that may be related to these or could possibly affect my regression.
Although I don't have much prior knowledge on your topic, it seems that you have a lot of questions you are determined to answer. Exactly how many variables do you think you will include in your regression? I'm also curious as to how your data collection is coming along and if you've found any articles that have previous research on your topic.
ReplyDeleteSteve, if you're looking for data on human capital, many states departments of education have information on number of years in school and other education or job training information.
ReplyDeletemerobr01, first, thanks for your response. I believe I can make myself clearer by saying that I really only have one main question that I want to answer, and then a follow-up. First, does firm-specific human capital actually effect the length of time between a first and second job? Secondly, does the level of education affect the length of time given that firm-specific human capital does? Basically, the followup forces to ask the question, are these two variables separate endogenous variables, or are they related to one another? There appears to be a good bit of literature on the topic. As far as the data collection, I'm at the point of refining the variables that I want to use that NLSY79 provides. My key concern is not the variables I already have in mind (Tenure, Length b/w Primary and Secondary Job, Years Education) but the lurking variables that I haven't yet accounted for.
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