This dissertation consists of three essays in development economics in three different national contexts. The first essay explores the productivity differential between return migrants ("Sea Turtles") and non-migrants through a case study of China's venture capital (VC) industry. I find that even after correcting for selection bias, return venture capitalists are less productive than comparable non-migrants in targeting promising projects and/or providing value-added services. Given that the VC industry is a useful laboratory in which to look at the performance of return migrants and China's economic development, I discuss why the presumably better human capital accumulated overseas does not translate into productivity in the Chinese market, and how related policies could reverse this situation in the long run.

The second essay exploits panel data and large, abrupt, and unusual dislocations of Indonesian workers in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis to investigate the robustness and persistence of inter-industry wage differentials (IWDs). Unobserved worker characteristics explain 36% of IWDs. IWDs persist through the post-crisis decade, although, consistent with a rent-sharing explanation, they shift alongside sectors' terms of trade in the wake of the crisis. Agriculture pays a wage penalty, and manufacturing sector a statistically significant but small premium. Most IWDs do not seem to be driven by minimum wage laws, worker monitoring costs, the disagreeability of the work, job-specific skills, industry-specific human capital, non-wage benefits or contracting terms.

In the third essay, the author examines the reduced-form relationship between the venture capital (VC) penetration and the embodied technological change (through the growth of capital services) and the disembodied technological change (through the growth of the total factor productivity (TFP)) at the sectoral level in the US. Combining various datasets from EU-KLEMS, PwC MoneyTree Report and STAN and applying various econometric strategies suitable for dynamic panel data, the author finds that the VC accessibility is positively associated with the capital service/TFP growth contemporarily, but that it is negatively correlated with them in the following years.