The Effects of Cognitive and Noncognitive Abilities on Labor Market Outcomes and Social Behavior

By Jim Heckman, Jora Stixrud, Sergio S. Urzúa. Journal of Labor Economics, 2006

3,965 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article establishes that a low‐dimensional vector of cognitive and noncognitive skills explains a variety of labor market and behavioral outcomes. Our analysis addresses the problems of measurement error, imperfect proxies, and reverse causality that plague conventional studies. Noncognitive skills strongly influence schooling decisions and also affect wages, given schooling decisions. Schooling, employment, work experience, and choice of occupation are affected by latent noncognitive and cognitive skills. We show that the same low‐dimensional vector of abilities that explains schooling choices, wages, employment, work experience, and choice of occupation explains a wide variety of risky behaviors.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a49c630b7acf9a6185471395c0823726f7184720

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Fostering and Measuring Skills: Improving Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills to Promote Lifetime Success (2014, positive): “Table 1.11 presents results from the structural model of Heckman, Stixrud, and Urzua (2006), suggesting that standardized adolescent measures of locus of control and self-esteem predict adult earnings to a similar degree as cognitive ability.”
Early Life Circumstance and Adult Mental Health (2019, positive): “In addition to being direct determinants of utility, psychological traits have been linked to physical and economic health and decision making in adults (Heckman and Rubinstein 2001; Heckman et al. 2006).”
Cognitive (ir)reflection: New experimental evidence☆ (2016, positive): “, 2009), academic achievement and labor market performance (Barrick and Mount, 1991; Judge et al., 1999; Heckman and Rubinstein, 2001; Zhao and Seibert, 2006; Heckman et al., 2006; Borghans et al., 2008a; Heckman and LaFontaine, 2010).”
The Economics of Human Development and Social Mobility (2014, positive): “A large literature surveyed in Heckman et al. (2006) and Rubinstein and Weiss (2006) models schooling choices and post-school on-the-job investment.”
Quality‐Consistent Estimates of International Schooling and Skill Gradients (2009, neutral): “2 Prior attention to the age comparisons has focused on the possibility that patterns of technological change and productivity growth could systematically alter the future labor market returns to schooling (Katz and Murphy 1992; Murphy and Welch 1992).”
Social and Economic Returns to College Education in the United States (2012, positive): “These things have been termed by some (e.g., Heckman et al. 2006) as noncognitive skills, an unfortunate term because the abilities in question do require thought.”
Comparing IV With Structural Models: What Simple IV Can and Cannot Identify (2010, neutral): “Heckman, Stixrud, and Urzua (2006) present an example of how to test an identification at 38See e.g. Card (2001).”
Employer Voices, Employer Demands, and Implications for Public Skills Development Policy (2014, positive): “…studies ﬁnd conditional correlations between socio-emotional skills and wages (Heckman and Rubenstein 2001; Kern et al. 2013; Mueller and Plug 2006; Heckman, Stixrud, and Urzu´a 2006), professional success (Duckworth et al. 2007), absenteeism in the work place (Stormer and Fahr 2010), and a range…”
Teacher Effects on Complex Cognitive Skills and Social-Emotional Competencies (2017, positive): “…and Tennessee Project STAR, documented the puzzling phenomenon of how the large effects of high-quality early-childhood and kindergarten classrooms on students’ academic achievement faded out over time, but then reappeared when examining adult outcomes such as employment and earnings as…”
Personality and Young Adult Financial Distress (2015, positive): “…earnings, wealth accumulation, schooling, occupational attainment, mortality and divorce (Bowles, Gintis, and Osborne, 2001b; Duckworth, Weir, Tsukayama, and Kwok, 2012; Heckman, Stixrud, and Urzua, 2006; Letkiewicz and Fox, 2014; Lundberg, 2013; Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, and Goldberg, 2007).”
Smart and Illicit: Who Becomes an Entrepreneur and Do They Earn More? (2017, positive): “Rosenberg Self-Esteem score, which is based on a ten-part questionnaire given to all NLSY79 participants in 1980, measures the degree of approval or disapproval of one’s self and has been widely used in psychology and economics (Bowles et al., 2001; Heckman et al., 2006).”
Individual determinants of work attendance: evidence on the role of personality (2013, neutral): “predictor to important outcomes of work life (Heckman et al., 2006).”