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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.

We study variation in skill demands for professionals across firms and labor markets. We categorize a wide range of keywords found in job ads into 10 general skills. There is substantial variation in these skill requirements, even within narrowly defined occupations. Focusing particularly on cognitive and social skills, we find positive correlations between each skill and external measures of pay and firm performance. We also find evidence of a cognitive social skill complementarity for both outcomes. As a whole, job skills have explanatory power in pay and firm performance regressions beyond what is available in widely used labor market data.

This article aims to improve our understanding about why and how individuals' signals of cognitive and noncognitive skills influence labour market outcomes. We study how employers use skills signals when hiring labour market entrants. These demand-side microprocesses are investigated at the apprenticeship market in Germany, which functions as the main entry labour market below tertiary-level education. Qualitative studies and personnel psychology research suggest multistage hiring processes. We concentrate on the first stage at which employers narrow the applicant pools based on written application documents. Their information is limited to applicants' school reports—including their grades (as signals of cognitive skills) and teachers' evaluations of their behaviours (as signals of non-cognitive skills). We conducted two linked field experiments, applying the correspondence test method. Analysing the unbiased employers' responses to randomly varied fictitious applicant profiles enables us to discover whether, and if so how, applicants' skills signals are used as 'screens' at the first selection stage. The experiments reveal that both skills signals are important selection criteria, but employers prefer noncognitive skills signals. Moreover, the findings confirm that firms use thresholds (cut-off values) for selection criteria instead of linear rankings.

I use Swedish registry data to estimate lifetime earnings returns to college and how they vary with observed and unobserved characteristics. The richness of the data also allows me to examine heterogeneity with respect to cognitive and noncognitive ability and parental earnings. Local instrumental variable analysis is used to recover marginal and average treatment effects under selection on gains. The findings support the notion of self-selection, but mainly on observed characteristics. Returns vary little with parental earnings but substantially with respect to both cognitive and noncognitive ability, thus suggesting important complementarities between formal schooling and informal skills.

We examine the effect of university education on students’ non-cognitive skills (NCS) using high-quality Australian longitudinal data. To isolate the skill-building effects of tertiary education, we follow the education decisions and NCS—proxied by the Big Five personality traits—of 575 adolescents over eight years. Estimating a standard skill production function, we demonstrate a robust positive relationship between university education and extraversion, and agreeableness for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The effects are likely to operate through exposure to university life rather than through degree-specific curricula or university-specific teaching quality. As extraversion and agreeableness are associated with socially beneficial behaviours, we propose that university education may have important non-market returns.

We provide new evidence on some of the mechanisms reflected in the intergenerational transmission of human capital. Applying both an adoption and a twin design to rich data from the Swedish military enlistment, we show that greater parental education increases sons’cognitive and non-cognitive skills, as well as their health. The estimates are in many cases similar across research designs and suggest that a substantial part of the effect of parental education on their young adult children’s human capital works through improving their skills and health.

This article considers skill requirements in retail work, drawing on the example of high-end fashion retailing. It considers debates about the required ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ elements of skill for such work. Drawing on Cockburn’s typology – skill residing in the worker; in what is required to perform a job; and as a socially constructed political concept – it seeks to offer a more nuanced discussion of the nature of skills in retail work beyond the usual characterization of such work as being inherently low skilled. Data are reported from 37 interviews with managers, supervisors and employees in a range of high-end fashion retailing outlets. The article recognizes how this work was seen as skilled by the interviewees, particularly with regard to the desired product knowledge and selling ability required for such work. Lastly, it seeks to refine Cockburn’s typology in understanding skill requirements in retail work.

This research examines the effect of skills in cities on regional wages. We use cluster analysis to identify three broad skill types—analytical, social intelligence and physical skills from 87 occupational skills. We examine how each skill contributes to regional wages and how they are related to regional size, using data from 1999 and 2008. We find that analytical and social intelligence skills have a significant positive effect on regional wages, while physical skills have a negative effect. Analytical skills are also somewhat more closely associated with regional wages than social intelligence skills, after controlling for education, industry, immigration and regional size. Furthermore, wage return to analytical and social intelligence skills has increased over time, and the return to physical skills has declined significantly. We also show that larger cities reward analytical and social intelligence skills to a higher degree, whereas smaller cities rely more on physical skills.

Empirical evidence suggests that educational attainment nurtures people’s social outcomes and promotes active participation in society and stability. However, it is unclear to what extent other types of human capital also correlate with social outcomes. Hence, we explored the opportunity offered by the PIAAC survey through its provision of information on educational attainment, observed individual key skills proficiency, and participation in adult education and training (adult lifelong learning). We therefore studied the association between these human capital variables and social outcomes, and more specifically interpersonal trust and participation in volunteering activities. Results revealed that these social outcomes were affected not only by the formal qualification obtained, determined by the education variable, but also throughout the life-cycle. Indeed, education and training when undertaken during adult life have a significant impact, especially on volunteering. The fact that the skill proficiency also plays a significant role is extremely relevant, as skills are more likely to change over the life-cycle, either in a positive or negative way. Whilst the formal education received is constant after exiting the educational system, skills reflect competences more accurately: first, because those with the same level of education may have different skill levels because of differences in the quality of education or ability; second, because skills can vary over time. For example, they may increase with work experience or informal education, or decrease as a result of depreciation and ageing. These findings suggest that social outcomes are prone to be affected by many factors other than formal education, suggesting that policy makers can implement recommendations even after formal education has been completed.

What makes you popular at school? What are the labor market returns to popularity? We investigate these questions using an objective measure of popularity derived from sociometric theory: the number of friendship nominations received from schoolmates, interpreted as a measure of early accumulation of personal social capital. Our econometric model of friendship formation and labor market outcomes allows for partial observation of networks, and provides new evidence on the impact of early family environment on popularity. We estimate that moving from the 20th to 80th percentile of the high school popularity distribution yields a 10 percent wage premium 40 years later.