The Creativity Premium

David Gill and Victoria Prowse

No 14421, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Success in life increasingly depends on key skills that allow people to thrive in education, the labor market, and their interactions with others. In this paper, we emphasize creativity as a key skill that is essential to open-ended problem solving and resistant to automation. We use rich longitudinal data to study the relationship between people's creativity measured in childhood and their individual attributes and life outcomes. We find that childhood creativity predicts labor market and educational success: more creative individuals earn more during the course of their careers, work in higher occupational categories, and reach higher levels of educational attainment. Our analysis of attributes further suggests that creative individuals have a package of practical skills that allows them to thrive in work environments where learning from experience is important. We combine insights from our findings with evidence from psychology to propose creativity-improving interventions that could lead to substantial economic benefits.

Keywords: educational attainment; occupational category; earnings; wages; labor market; longitudinal; children; life outcomes; skills; creativity; practical skills; experience; cognitive ability; human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2021-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published as 'The Creativity Premium: Exploring the Link between Childhood Creativity and Life Outcomes' in: Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, 2024, 2 (3), 495–526

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14421.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Creativity Premium (2022)
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:iza:izadps:dp14421

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().