Conscientiousness in the Workplace: Evidence from a Field Experiment in West Africa

Non-cognitive skills are increasingly recognized as important determinants of labor market outcomes. To what extent specific skills can be affected in adulthood remains an open question. This study conducted a randomized controlled trial with low-skilled employed workers in Senegal, where workers were randomly assigned to receive a training intervention designed to affect conscientiousness-related skills. The findings show that treated workers were significantly more likely to stay in their job and have higher wages nine months after the intervention. The findings suggest that non-cognitive skills can be affected even later in the life cycle and can have substantial labor market returns.

The evolving labor environment underscores the critical role of cognitive and non-cognitive (soft) skills in fostering workforce adaptability and enhancing labor market outcomes. This study investigates the combined influence of these skills on the probability of employment, focusing on the Kenyan labor market, where high youth unemployment and job market mismatches persist despite government interventions and education sector reforms. Traditionally, emphasis has been placed on cognitive skills, with limited integration of non-cognitive skills into educational curricula, exacerbating the disconnect between youth competencies and market demands. Using binary logistic regression, this study evaluates factors influencing youth employment, highlighting the complementarity of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Findings reveal that individuals possessing a blend of these skills have higher employment prospects, with notable improvements for young women possessing agreeableness and digital literacy. Additionally, factors such as marital status and higher education levels positively influence employability. These results underscore the equal importance of personality traits and cognitive abilities in labor market success. Policymakers are urged to prioritize curriculum reforms that integrate non-cognitive skill development and encourage employers to include assessments of these skills in hiring practices to address persistent labor market mismatches.

This paper provides the first causal evidence of the effect of a change in divorce laws on noncognitive skills in adulthood. We exploit state-cohort variation in the adoption of unilateral divorce laws in the U.S. to assess whether children exposed to this law have different noncognitive skills in adulthood compared to those never exposed or exposed as adults. Using data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the U.S. (MIDUS) and employing the staggered difference-in-differences identification strategy developed by Callaway and Sant’Anna, we show that divorce reform had a detrimental long-term effect on the conscientiousness of those who were exposed as children whether their parents divorced or not. Changes in parental inputs can explain most of the effect, which is greatest for men whose parents divorced.

The causal effect of genetic variants linked to cognitive and non-cognitive skills on education and labor market outcomes

We study whether employment history can provide information about a worker’s non-cognitive skills - in particular, about “work attitude,” or the ability to work well and cooperatively with others. We conjecture that, holding all else equal, a worker’s frequent job changes can indicate poorer work attitude, and that this information is transmitted in labor markets through employment histories. We provide support for this hypothesis across three studies that employ complementary lab, field, and survey experiments. First, a laboratory labor market, in which the only valuable characteristic of workers is their reliability in cooperating with an employer’s effort requests, demonstrates that prior employment information allows employers to screen for such reliability and allows high-reliability workers to obtain better employment outcomes. Second, we conduct a field experiment that varies the frequency of job changes in fictitious job applicants’ resumes. Those applicants with fewer job changes receive substantially more callbacks from prospective employers. Finally, a survey experiment with human resource professionals confirms that the resume manipulations in the field study create different perceptions of work attitude and that these account for the callback differences. Our work highlights the potential importance of job history as a signal of worker characteristics, and points to a cost for workers of frequent job changes.

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 noncognitive 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.

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.

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.

This paper reviews the empirical economic literature on the relative importance of non cognitive skills for school and labour market outcomes, with a focus on Europe. There is evidence that high cognitive test scores are likely to result not only from high cognitive skills but also from high motivation and adequate personality traits. This suggests that part of the contribution of cognitive skills to economic growth could be due to personality traits. Across large parts of the literature, there is consensus that non cognitive skills have important effects both on school attainment and on labour market outcomes. These effects might be as important as the effects of cognitive skills. Less consensus exists on the malleability of non cognitive skills, with some arguing that these skills can be altered until the end of teenage years and others claiming that emotional intelligence can be changed at any age. Most of what economists know about the technology of non cognitive skill formation concerns early educational levels, such as preschools and schools. While it is difficult to argue that all relevant skill formation ends before labour market entry, there is scant evidence on the role of the workplace in the maintenance and development of existing skills. Clearly, more research in this area is needed.

Evidence from developed country data suggests that cognitive and non-cognitive skills contribute to improved labor market outcomes. This paper tests this hypothesis in a developing country by using an individual-level data set from Peru that incorporates modules to measure cognitive and non-cognitive skills. The paper estimates a structural latent model with unobserved heterogeneity to capture full ability rather than just measured skill. It also applies standard ordinary least squares techniques for comparison. The analysis confirms that cognitive and non-cognitive skills are positively correlated with a range of labor market outcomes in Peru. In particular, cognitive skills positively correlate with wages and the probability of being a wage worker, white-collar, and formal worker, with verbal fluency and numeric ability playing particularly strong roles. The results are robust to methodology. The patterns are less uniform for non-cognitive skills. For instance, perseverance of effort (grit) emerges strongly for most outcomes regardless of methodology. However, plasticity—an aggregation of openness to experience and emotional stability—is only correlated with employment, and only when using the structural latent model. The ordinary least squares method also finds that the disaggregated non-cognitive skills of kindness, cooperation, emotional stability, and openness to experience emerge significantly, mostly for the wage estimates. The different results derived from the ordinary least squares and the structural model with latent skills suggest strong measurement bias in most non-cognitive skills measurement. These findings, although only correlational because of the use of a single cross-section, suggest that recent efforts by the Peruvian government to incorporate non-cognitive skill development into the school curriculum are justified.

Non-cognitive skills are increasingly essential in the labor market, especially given technological advances and evolving work environments. Unequal distribution of non-cognitive skills among various groups in the population may contribute to labor market inequalities. This article investigates the significance of non-cognitive skills for immigrant-native inequalities in the European labor market. Specifically, we examine the potential differences in non-cognitive skills between native and immigrant groups and how these differences may affect their income. Additionally, we explore whether equal levels of non-cognitive skills have comparable payoffs for native and immigrant groups in society. We use, comparative survey data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies and OLS regressions with country fixed effects. Our findings show that many immigrants exhibit lower levels of non-cognitive skills than native-born workers, despite differences between origin groups. This difference in non-cognitive skills explains part of the immigrant-native inequality in the labor market for most immigrant-origin groups. Moreover, our results indicate that immigrants, especially those from Central and Eastern European countries, benefit less from exercising comparable non-cognitive skills than native-born workers. Our study highlights the importance of non-cognitive skills in addressing the labor market disadvantage faced by immigrants, and emphasizes that policymakers and educators should recognize the significance of these skills when developing policies targeting immigrants.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of noncognitive skills on educational mismatch in the context of China and to further explore the potential mechanisms concerning how noncognitive skills determine mismatch outcomes.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses the Chinese Family Panel Survey of 2018, which provides the Big Five Personality Inventory to assess respondents' noncognitive skills and contains information on educational mismatch. The authors estimate the effects of noncognitive skills on educational mismatch by means of a probit model. Additionally, the correlated random effects (CRE) model and instrumental variable (IV) approach have also been exploited in the robust checks.FindingsThe findings show that the composite score of noncognitive skills reduces the probability of being overeducated and, conversely, increases the likelihood of being undereducated. When distinguishing the effects of different personality traits, the authors find significantly negative effects of agreeableness and openness on overeducation and a positive effect of openness on undereducation. With regard to heterogeneous analysis, the effects of noncognitive skills on educational mismatch exist mostly among white-collar employees and employees with fewer than 5 years of work experience. Finally, the authors provide two likely mechanisms related to job search effort and social capital, followed by the presentation of supporting evidence.Practical implicationsThe results of this paper underline the importance of noncognitive skills in raising the quality of jobs that individuals can obtain. This suggests that the development of noncognitive skills should be encouraged to be integrated into formal education systems and social job training programs in China.Originality/valueDespite a growing interest in its consequences in the labor market, the role of noncognitive skills in determining educational mismatch has rarely been discussed in developing countries. This study provides the first evidence regarding the effects of noncognitive skills on education mismatch in China. It contributes to the research on noncognitive skills' labor market outcomes and enhances the understanding of the factors driving educational mismatch.

In an extensive review of wage determination papers, it is concluded that the standard demographic and human capital factors explain little of earning differentials. Consequently, there is a growing interest among economists to include non-cognitive skills measured by personality traits in recent empirical literature to explain variations in earnings. In a bid to contribute empirical evidence to this strand of literature, this study examines the associations between the Big-Five personality traits (i.e., agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, extraversion and neuroticism) and earnings, using the World Bank’s Skills towards Employment and Productivity (STEP) data on Ghana. The study employed regression techniques to estimate a series of semi-logarithmic wage equations that include demographic and human capital factors and the Big-Five personality traits to determine how important these factors are in explaining wage and self-employment earnings. Furthermore, the estimations of the wage equations are done separately for males and females to highlight any gender differences in the way personality traits contribute to earnings. Findings are largely consistent with the literature but uniquely demonstrate that in a power-distant culture like Ghana, where, traditionally, girl-child education has been relegated to the background, agreeable females, and not males, are rewarded in the formal wage employment labour market. However, in the informal self-employment labour market, conscientious males, and not females, are positively rewarded with higher earnings. These unique findings contribute to our understanding of the gender differences in the relative importance of non-cognitive skills in the formal and informal labour markets. JEL Codes: J31, J24

This paper uses population panel data from Sweden to investigate the causes and consequences of self-employment over the life cycle, and to evaluate how self-employment decisions can be influenced by policy. In the first part of the paper, I use machine learning methods to summarize the patterns of self-employment behavior observed in the data. I find that careers involving self-employment fit into a small number of economically distinct groups. Some self-employment spells are short, with minimal capital investment and rapid return to paid employment, while others persist and have substantial capital devoted to the business from the outset. Guided by these descriptive results, I develop and estimate a dynamic Roy model in which self-employment decisions depend on factors such as cognitive and non-cognitive skills, prior work experience, the cost of capital, and other labor market opportunities. The model integrates traditional models of dynamic career choice that feature human capital investment and models of business start-up that feature physical capital investment. I estimate the model and use it to evaluate policies designed to promote self-employment. Cognitive and non-cognitive skills, education, and prior work experience are important determinants of the types of businesses individuals start, how much capital they employ, and how long they remain in self-employment. Subsidies that incentivize self-employment are generally ineffective, both in terms of promoting long-lasting firms and in terms of improving the welfare and earnings of those induced to enter self-employment.

This paper describes the results from an evaluation of a public policy that offers scholarships to current and former public high school students, so that they can attend technical and vocational education courses free of charge. We use a waiting list randomized controlled trial in four municipalities in a southern Brazilian State (Santa Catarina) to quantify the effects of the program on school progression, labor market outcomes and non-cognitive skills. Our intention-to-treat estimates reveal substantial gender heterogeneity two years after program completion. Women experienced large gains in labor market outcomes and non-cognitive skills. Employment rose by 21 percentage points (or approximately 33%) and the gains in earnings are of more than 50%. Also, women who received the offer scored 0.5σ higher on the synthetic index of non-cognitive skills and 0.69σ higher on an extraversion indicator. We find no effects on the male sub-sample. These findings corroborate the evidence on gender heterogeneity in the labor market effects of technical and vocational education programs. We also perform a series of exercises to explore potential channels through which these effects arise.