Noncognitive Skills, Occupational Attainment, and Relative Wages

Deborah Cobb-Clark and Michelle Tan ()
Additional contact information
Michelle Tan: Australian National University

No 4289, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper examines whether men's and women's noncognitive skills influence their occupational attainment and, if so, whether this contributes to the disparity in their relative wages. We find that noncognitive skills have a substantial effect on the probability of employment in many, though not all, occupations in ways that differ by gender. Consequently, men and women with similar noncognitive skills enter occupations at very different rates. Women, however, have lower wages on average not because they work in different occupations than men do, but rather because they earn less than their male colleagues employed in the same occupation. On balance, women's noncognitive skills give them a slight wage advantage. Finally, we find that accounting for the endogeneity of occupational attainment more than halves the proportion of the overall gender wage gap that is unexplained.

Keywords: decomposition; gender wage gap; noncognitve skills; personality; occupation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2009-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published - published in: Labour Economics, 2011, 18 (1), 1-13

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp4289.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Noncognitive skills, occupational attainment, and relative wages (2011)
Working Paper: Noncognitive Skills, Occupational Attainment, and Relative Wages (2009)
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:dp4289

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 ().