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...

This study was prepared by Gabriela Schütz while she was working with the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in September 2008 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Economics Department of the University of Munich (LMU). The topic of this study is an econometric analysis...