TESIS PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE MASTER EN ANÁLISIS ECONÓMICO / Using a longitudinal database that follows 100,899 individuals through nine years of their
life from high school into labor market, we are able to identify cognitive and non-cognitive abilities
at school age and their effect on wages. For measuring the effect of soft skills on wages we use two
proxies: average school attendance and school grades ranking.
Since an individual’s productivity is compound of both abilities both types of skills may impact
outcomes such as test scores, dropout rates, and wages. While the effect of cognitive skills is widely
studied, yet little has been said about the role of soft skills on such outcomes in less developed
countries.
Our main finding is that non-cognitive abilities are as or more important as cognitive abilities in
explaining wages. One standard deviation increase in math SIMCE score raises wages by 2.36%
while the same change in grades ranking increases wages by 5.03%.
These findings are particularly important in a context of a high inequality country like Chile. The
fact that trainable non-cognitive abilities affect wages is another opportunity for social policy to
reduce the existent wage gaps in a cost effective way.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UCHILE/oai:repositorio.uchile.cl:2250/144144 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Palma C., María Isidora |
| Contributors | Contreras Guajardo, Dante |
| Publisher | Universidad de Chile |
| Source Sets | Universidad de Chile |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Tesis |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Chile, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/cl/ |
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