Wage premia for skills: The complementarity of cognitive and non-cognitive skills

Marta Palczyńska

No 09/2018, IBS Working Papers from Instytut Badan Strukturalnych

Abstract: This paper provides evidence on the association between individuals' cognitive abilities, personality traits, and earnings. I find that cognitive skills and certain personality traits are complements. In particular, I find that cognitive skills and emotional stability are complementary, with neurotic individuals having significantly lower returns to their cognitive skills. Furthermore, my results indicate that agreeableness, neuroticism, and – surprisingly – grit are penalised signi?cantly in the labour market; and that there is a positive relationship between conscientiousness and wages. Finally, I observe that, contrary to previous findings, women and men have similar returns to personality traits. I use well-established measures of cognitive skills and personality: namely, competence tests from the PIAAC survey to assess cognitive skills, as well as the Big Five inventory and the Grit scale to assess personality traits.

Keywords: cognitive skills; personality traits; social skills; earnings (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2018-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-neu
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://ibs.org.pl//app/uploads/2018/12/IBS_Working_Paper_09_2018.pdf English Version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Wage premia for skills: the complementarity of cognitive and non-cognitive skills (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ibt:wpaper:wp092018

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IBS Working Papers from Instytut Badan Strukturalnych Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by IBS ().