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Title: The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Deming, David |
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The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market Quarterly Journal of Economics 4,1 (November 2017): 1593-1640. Also: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/132/4/1593/3861633#96326149 Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97 Publisher: Oxford University Press Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Noncognitive Skills; Occupational Information Network (O*NET); Sociability/Socialization/Social Interaction; Wages Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. The labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs--including many STEM occupations--shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period. Employment and wage growth were particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skills. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers "trade tasks" to exploit their comparative advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and work together more efficiently. The model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I investigate using data from the NLSY79 and the NLSY97. Using a comparable set of skill measures and covariates across survey waves, I find that the labor market return to social skills was much greater in the 2000s than in the mid-1980s and 1990s. |
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Bibliography Citation
Deming, David. "The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market." Quarterly Journal of Economics 4,1 (November 2017): 1593-1640.
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