Is there such a thing as leadership skill? – A replication and extension of the relationship between high school leadership positions and later-life earnings

Abstract

This paper replicates and extends Kuhn and Weinberger's (2005) “Leadership Skills and Wages”. The original article found that those white males who were club presidents and team captains in high school earned significantly more eleven years later. As the empirical relationship between leadership positions and subsequent earnings includes those characteristics that predate high school and those that are developed because of leadership activity participation in high school, the original study cannot differentiate between leadership skills developed earlier and those developed in high school. We employ propensity score matching on leadership exposure in high school to control for potential endogenous observable selection and provide estimates from instrumental variable regressions to assess the robustness of the original effects to other omitted causes. To investigate the generalizability of the original findings, we also extend the sample by including females and non-white males. Lastly, we investigate how an extension of the initial (11-year) time horizon to almost 50 years affects the coefficient estimates. We can corroborate the original effect that those who occupied leadership positions as captains and presidents earn more 11 years after high school and report higher income some 50 years after high school. We fail, however, to find effects for those who occupied only a role as captain or president solely. Moreover, the findings do not generalize to the samples of females and non-white males. Our findings provide important insights into later-life benefits of early leadership exposure and have implications for those designing leadership training programs and those taking on (or refraining from) leadership positions in early life.