People Skills and the Labor-Market Outcomes of Underrepresented Groups

Bas ter Weel, Lex Borghans and Bruce Weinberg

No 253, CPB Discussion Paper from CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis

Abstract: This paper shows that people skills are important determinants of labor-market outcomes, including occupational choice and wages. Technological and organizational changes have increased the importance of people skills in the workplace. We particularly focus on how the increased importance of people skills has affected the labor-market outcomes of underrepresented groups assuming gender differences in interactions and that cultural differences (including prejudice) may impede cross-racial and ethnic interactions. Our estimates for Britain, Germany and the United States are consistent with such an explanation. Acceleration in the rate of increase in the importance of people skills between the late 1970s and early 1990s in the US can help explain why the gender-wage gap closed and the black-white wage gap stagnated in these years relative to the preceding and following years.

JEL-codes: J16 J21 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm, nep-lab, nep-lma, nep-ltv and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cpb.nl/sites/default/files/publicaties ... presented-groups.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: People Skills and the Labor-Market Outcomes of Underrepresented Groups (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpb:discus:253

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CPB Discussion Paper from CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().