The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market

By David J. Deming. 2017

1,570 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 was particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skill. 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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac62aa4019ed1b369464529c1a1b959dfdff74dd

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Citations in the corpus

Measuring the Occupational Impact of AI: Tasks, Cognitive Abilities and AI Benchmarks (2020, background): “This ﬁnding contributes to Deming (2017) who ﬁnds growing market returns to social skills in the 2000s as opposed to the 1980s and 1990s because social and cognitive skills (i.e. maths, statistics, engineering and science) are complements.”
The future of skills: employment in 2030 (2017, background): “Deming (2015) finds that in the US nearly all job growth since 1980 has been in occupations which are relatively social skill-intensive.”
Social Image and Economic Behavior in the Field: Identifying, Understanding and Shaping Social Pressure (2017, neutral): “Beyond the twoaudience signaling model, there is increasing evidence that social skills are rewarded in the labor market more generally, such as by reducing coordination costs within the workplace (Deming 2016).”
Gender-Typed Play and Social Abilities in Boys and Girls: Are They Related? (2016, background): “…social skills, including empathy and being able to comfort others, are implicated in adults’ interests and involvement as caregivers, including parenting (Blakemore et al. 2009; Hyde 2005), and may be increasingly valued among employers in 21st century service-focused labor markets (Deming 2015).”
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Labor Market (2019, methodology): “12Examples include Howell and Wolff (1991), Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003), and Deming (2017).”
Advancing the Science and Practice of Social and Emotional Learning (2016, background): “The second demonstrated the relationship between some or all of these skills and postsecondary and vocational success (Deming, 2015; Duckworth & Seligman, 2005; Fergusson, Boden, & Horwood, 2013).”
People Management Skills, Employee Attrition, and Manager Rewards: An Empirical Analysis (2020, neutral): “Deming (2017) emphasizes that social skills are important for teamwork (horizontal production).”
Socioeconomic Status and Inequalities in Children’s IQ and Economic Preferences (2017, neutral): “Subsequently, in line with some of the recent literature (Cunha and Heckman 2007; Doepke and Zilibotti 2017; Cobb-Clark, Salamanca, and Zhu 2019), we propose and estimate a framework in which SES can influence both the level of investments and their overall productivity.”