Cognitive and non-cognitive skills are important determinants of labor market outcomes, but are often unobserved. We propose a proxy for these skills derived from item non-response information and a procedure to test its validity. Exploiting a unique data-collection feature of an Australian...

In this paper, we study the effect of the timing of puberty on educational achievement and examine to what extent the gender differences in the timing of puberty can explain gender differences in achievement. We use British cohort data that combine information on pubertal development with test...

Prevailing research argues that childhood misbehavior in the classroom is bad for schooling and, presumably, bad for adult outcomes. In contrast, we argue that childhood misbehavior represents some underlying non-cognitive skills that are valuable in the labor market. We follow work from...

Schools are ripe for policy intervention. We demonstrate that implementing different teaching practices is effective, finding a greater prevalence of group discussion used in schools positively affects students’ life satisfaction and noncognitive skills but has no impact on test scores. The...

Peacetime military service has both positive and negative effects on human capital. While it depreciates academic abilities it also enhances non-cognitive skills. The net effect of conscription is hard to identify due to issues of self-selection, endogenous timing and omitted variables bias. We...

We analyze trends in labor-market returns to psychological traits using data from half a million Finnish men from 2001 to 2015. Cognitive skills' value declined, while noncognitive skills' value increased. Our novel findings show that extraversion drives this rise, while conscientiousness...

This paper investigates how framing manipulations affect the quantity and quality of decisions. In a field experiment in elementary schools, 1.377 pupils are randomly assigned to one of three conditions in a multiple-choice test: (i) gain frame (Control), (ii) loss frame (Loss) and (iii) gain...

Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

This paper surveys the empirical and theoretical link between education and growth in the growth process of Asian countries. Particular attention is paid to the link between education and productivity, and to models that characterize key features of growth processes of Asian countries. Empirical...