 Interpersonal, cognitive, and manual skills: How do they shape employment and wages?Esther Mirjam Girsberger, Miriam Koomen and Matthias Krapf Labour Economics, 2022, vol. 78, issue C Abstract: We study how interpersonal, cognitive, and manual skills affect employment and wages in a search and matching model through their impact on productivity, complementarity, job destruction, and the cost of unemployment. Combining several data sets on workers who acquired skills in vocational education and training (VET), we quantify each channel, allowing for unobserved heterogeneity in ability. All three skills increase productivity, yet they affect job destruction rates differentially. While manual skills are associated with lower job destruction, interpersonal and cognitive skills have the opposite effect. Focusing on low-ability workers, we then estimate the value of VET. Through VET, wages increase up to 10% and unemployment drops by over 50%. Low-ability workers thus have particularly large benefits from acquiring manual skills because they increase wages and shield from unemployment. Keywords: Multidimensional skills; Unemployment; Wages; Vocational education and training; Labour market search (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:labeco:v:78:y:2022:i:c:s0927537122001257 DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2022.102235 Access Statistics for this article Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier |
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