The Economic Value of Socio-Emotional Skills

Micro Seminar
Children hand playing with wooden colourful dinosaurs

We investigate the relationship between child socio-emotional skills and labour market outcomes using longitudinal data from the 1970 British Cohort Study. We perform a novel factor analysis of child skills and capture four latent dimensions, representing ‘attention’, ‘conduct’, ‘emotional’, and ‘peers’ problems. 

Speaker
Emilia Del Bono
Date
Friday 18 Oct 2024, 12:00 - 13:15
Type
Seminar
Room
VB-56
Building
V Building
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joint work with Ben Etheridge (Essex) and Paul Garcia (Essex)

Conditional on a range of confounding variables, we find that conduct problems, driven by aggression and impulsivity, are associated with positive outcomes in the labour market: higher wages, higher labour supply, sorting into ‘good’ jobs and higher productivity conditional on job tasks. Attention problems are instead negatively associated with labour market outcomes and this relationship is partially accounted for by schooling. We explore different mediating pathways, including through career interests, socialization and mental health - all measured in the adolescent period - but none of these is able to fully explain the association between child skills and later economic outcomes

About the speaker

Emilia is Professor of Economics at ISER, University of Essex. Her research agenda is focused on the nature, causes, and consequences of disparities in children’s human capital that lead to inequalities later on in life.  Her most recent papers seek to better understand the role of socio-emotional skills in dynamic models of child development and explore how these skills help explain differences in labour market outcomes. Emilia is also Director of the ESRC-funded Centre for Micro Social Change (MiSoC).

Registration

If you would like to have a bilateral or join the speaker for lunch or dinner on Friday, please send an email to boring@ese.eur.nl

See also

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