One Size does not Fit All: Multiple Dimensions of Ability, College Attendance and Wages

Prada, María Fernanda; Urzúa, Sergio

doi:10.3386/w20752

Cited by 5 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 28 publications

(50 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Technical abilities, a subset of cognitive skills, influence the probability of going to college. By contrast to cognitive and socio-emotional skill levels, in the United States a higher level of vocational ability is associated with a lower probability of attending a four-year college because individuals with higher technical skills expect higher returns from a vocational education (Prada 2013;Prada and Urzúa 2014).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Qualifications: Returns to Cognitive and Socio-Emotional Skills in Colombia

Acosta¹,

Muller²,

Sarzosa

2015

Policy Research Working Papers

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. This paper examines the relationship between individuals' skills and labor market outcomes for the working-age population of Colombia's urban areas. Using a 2012 unique household survey, the paper finds that cognitive skills (aptitudes to perform mental tasks such as comprehension or reasoning) and socio-emotional skills (personality traits and behaviors) matter for favorable labor market outcomes in the Colombian context, although they have distinct roles. Cognitive skills are greatly associated with higher earnings and holding a formal job or a high-qualified occupation. By contrast, socio-emotional skills appear to have little direct influence on these outcomes, but play a stronger role in labor market participation. Both types of skills, especially cognitive skills, are largely associated with pursuing tertiary education. The analysis applies standard econometric techniques as a benchmark and structural estimations to correct for the measurement error of skill constructs.JEL Classification: J24, J31, I24

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Qualifications: Returns to Cognitive and Socio-Emotional Skills in Colombia

Acosta¹,

Muller²,

Sarzosa

2015

Policy Research Working Papers

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In the above linear measurement system, we follow Prada andUrzúa (2017), Heckman et al (2006), among others and treat each skill and parental valuation for education independently. We are imposing an upper triangular assumption on the measurement system, that requires each of the factors to be mutually independent.…”

Section: Latent Competenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While the main results appear robust to a two factor model that treats each test measure to be a "pure" measure of a specific factor, there were large computational costs associated with relaxing these assumptions. As such, we follow Prada and Urzúa (2017) and exclude the cognitive skill factor as a determinant of any non-cognitive test score and vice versa. 18 This interpretation comes from normalizing one loading per factor to equal 1.…”

Section: The Education Decisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Due to their multidimensional nature, cognitive and non-cognitive skills are rewarded in the labor market according to their combinations (e.g. Urzúa (2008), Prada and Urzúa (2017)). Figure 6 presents a new set of panels containing three dimensional graphs that explores how the average simulated outcome varies across the two competency distributions when evaluated.…”

Section: Evidence From Simulation Of the Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We also contribute to the literature evaluating the labor market consequences of different measures of skills by following the suggestion in Prada and Urzúa (2017) and explore gender differences. 4 A growing literature not only documents gender differences in non-cognitive skills at early ages (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

How Skills and Parental Valuation of Education Influence Human Capital Acquisition and Early Labor Market Return to Human Capital in Canada

Kottelenberg

Lehrer

2019

Journal of Labor Economics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Using the Youth in Transition Survey we estimate a Roy model with a three dimensional latent factor structure to consider how parental valuation of education, cognitive skills and non-cognitive skills influence endogenous schooling decisions and subsequent labour market outcomes in Canada. We find the effect of cognitive skills on adult incomes arises by increasing the likelihood of obtaining further education. Further, we find that both non-cognitive skills and parental valuation for education play a larger role in determining income at age 25 than cognitive skills. Last, our analysis uncovers striking differences between men and women in several of the estimated relationships. Specifically, simulations of the estimated model illustrate that i) among the low skilled, women have much higher college graduation rates, ii) the age 25 earnings gradient by either skill measure is much flatter for women, and iii) parental valuation of education plays a larger role in influencing young women than men. * We thank seminar participants at the 2014 CLSRN/CEA Annual meetings, University of Calgary, NBER Public Policies in Canada and the United States conference and the University of Calgary for helpful comments and suggestions. A special thanks to Ross Finnie and Stephen Childs for their help in the early stages of this project. Kottelenberg and Lehrer also wish to thank EPRI and SSHRC for research support. We are grateful to the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities for generous financial support through the Ontario Human Capital Research and Innovation Fund and note that the views expressed in the publication are the views of the Recipient and do not necessarily reflect those of the Ministry. The usual caveats applies.

show abstract

Implementing Factor Models for Unobserved Heterogeneity in Stata

Sarzosa

Urzúa

2016

The Stata Journal: Promoting communications on statistics and S

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We introduce a new command, heterofactor, for the maximum likelihood estimation of models with unobserved heterogeneity, including a Roy model. heterofactor fits models with up to four latent factors and allows the unobserved heterogeneity to follow general distributions. Our command differs from Stata's sem command in that it does not rely on the linearity of the structural equations and distributional assumptions for identification of the unobserved heterogeneity. It uses the estimated distributions to numerically integrate over the unobserved factors in the outcome equations by using a mixture of normals in a Gauss-Hermite quadrature. heterofactor delivers consistent estimates, including the unobserved factor loadings, in a variety of model structures.

show abstract

One Size does not Fit All: Multiple Dimensions of Ability, College Attendance and Wages

Cited by 5 publications

References 28 publications

Beyond Qualifications: Returns to Cognitive and Socio-Emotional Skills in Colombia

Beyond Qualifications: Returns to Cognitive and Socio-Emotional Skills in Colombia

How Skills and Parental Valuation of Education Influence Human Capital Acquisition and Early Labor Market Return to Human Capital in Canada

Implementing Factor Models for Unobserved Heterogeneity in Stata

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About