It's Not Me, It's You: Social Skills and Human Capital in the Labor and Marriage Markets

Laura Turner, Aloysius Siow and Gueorgui Kambourov
Additional contact information
Laura Turner: University of Toronto
Aloysius Siow: University of Toronto

No 1165, 2013 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This paper examines the role of social skills, as distinct from standard wage-determining human capital, in determining economic outcomes in labor and marriage markets. Social skill, or social capacity, is understood in our framework as the ability to maintain long-term relationships, whether professional or personal. Using a Mincer-Jovanovic (1981) framework and evidence on job and marital separations from the PSID, we argue that social capacity can be understood as an individual fixed factor affecting the durability of relationships both in the formal work and informal household sectors. We then use merged PSID and O*NET data to develop and estimate a life cycle model of schooling, job search and marriage. The model allows us to examine quantitatively how social capacity affects optimal schooling and occupational decisions, as well as to estimate the joint distribution of social capacity and human capital in the population. Preliminary evidence suggests that social capacity strongly increases the return to education, conditional on an individual's human capital, since it lowers the probability of being fired from "good" jobs that require substantial human interaction, which in turn makes it easier for an individual to climb the career ladder.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
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:red:sed013:1165

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2013 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().