Hard evidence on soft skills

By James J. Heckman, Tim Kautz. Labour Economics, 2012

1,795 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper summarizes recent evidence on what achievement tests measure; how achievement tests relate to other measures of “cognitive ability” like IQ and grades; the important skills that achievement tests miss or mismeasure, and how much these skills matter in life. Achievement tests miss, or perhaps more accurately, do not adequately capture, soft skills—personality traits, goals, motivations, and preferences that are valued in the labor market, in school, and in many other domains. The larger message of this paper is that soft skills predict success in life, that they causally produce that success, and that programs that enhance soft skills have an important place in an effective portfolio of public policies.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a5cb602f0972c7d71c50aac5b211e75e10482c5b

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Citations in the corpus

The Economics of Human Development and Social Mobility (2014, neutral): “22See Borghans et al. (2008) and Heckman and Kautz (2012, 2014).”
Social and emotional skills for student success and well-being: Conceptual framework for the OECD study on social and emotional skills (2018, background): “Another good illustration of this interplay between personality and cognitive skills is shown in an example from the General Educational Development (GED) programme (Heckman and Kautz, 2012[38]).”
Soft Skills or Hard Cash? The Impact of Training and Wage Subsidy Programs on Female Youth Employment in Jordan (2012, background): “There is also now growing evidence that non-cognitive or soft skills are important for employment and a range of other life outcomes (e.g. Bowles et al, 2001; Heckman et al., 2006; Heckman and Kautz, 2012).”
Behavioral Economics of Education (2015, background): “In the same vein, Heckman and Rubinstein (2001) report that a test certifying that the test taker has American or Canadian high-school-level academic skills (the General Educational Development Test) is a mixed signal.”
Promoting Women's Economic Empowerment: What Works? (2014, background): “‘Soft skills’ are personality traits, motivations and preferences that are valued in the labor market, and recent evidence shows that they matter and should have an important place as part of job training programs (Heckman and Kautz 2012).”
The Gender Gap in Mathematics Achievement: Evidence from Italian Data (2016, neutral): “Girls display less math self-efficacy (self-confidence in solving math related problems) and math self-concept (beliefs in their own abilities), and more anxiety and stress in doing math related activities (OECD 2015, Heckman and Kautz 2012, 2014; Lubienski et al 2013, Twenge and Campbell 2001).”
Employer Voices, Employer Demands, and Implications for Public Skills Development Policy (2014, background): “Similar programs exist in developing countries as well (Heckman and Kautz 2012; Alfonso et al. 2012).”
The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations (2017, background): “Labor economists have become increasingly interested in the effect of noncognitive or “soft” skills—including psychological attributes, preferences, and personality— on labor-market outcomes and behavior (Heckman and Kautz 2012).”
The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market (2017, background): “Subsequent work, summarized in Heckman & Kautz (2012), finds that “noncognitive” or “soft” skills explain important variation in adult outcomes.”