Do Socio-Emotional Skills Pay Off and Can They Be Developed Through Training ? A Meta-Analysis

Diego Angel-Urdinola, Maurice Kugler, Narae Lee, Angelo Santos and Olzhas Zhorayev

No 11384, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper synthesizes the growing evidence on the labor market returns to socio-emotional skills and assesses the effectiveness of training programs designed to develop these skills. While existing studies document elevated re-turns to socio-emotional skills in the labor market, there is little consensus on which specific aspects of the skills drive these gains. Using one of the established psychological measures, the Big Five personality traits (the Big Five), the paper defines relevant keywords for socio-emotional skills, conducts web scraping of the literature, and constructs a database of coefficients on returns and training impacts. DerSimonian and Laird random-effects estimates suggest that a one standard deviation increase in each of the Big Five traits is associated with a 1.4 to 3.1 percent increase in real wages, with substantial heterogeneity across individual traits, demographic groups, and country income levels. Among the Big Five, lower agreeableness, often associated with assertiveness and being able to challenge consensus, exhibits the highest wage returns (3.1 percent). Training programs improve the Big Five traits by an average of 0.46 standard deviation, with larger effects for attitude-related traits such as openness (0.67 standard deviation) and conscientiousness (0.40 standard deviation). Although early childhood constitutes a critical period for cognitive skill formation, the evidence presented in this paper indicates that socio-emotional competencies remain markedly malleable in later developmental stages. Well-designed post-secondary interventions can generate substantial gains.

Date: 2026-05-18
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