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Matched employee-employer data from the UK are used to investigate the importance of social skills, in particular team-work and communication with coworkers, as a driver of wage growth for workers with lower formal education. We find that in social skills tasks, workers enjoy greater wage progression with tenure and also accrue higher returns in firms with a higher concentration of more educated colleagues. Additionally, workers exit sooner from jobs where social skill are more important. We rationalize these dynamics through a model that assesses social skills based on complementarity with a firm’s assets, where social skills, initially opaque to both the employee and employer, become increasingly apparent over time.
Authors
Research Fellow London School of Economics
Philippe is an IFS Research Fellow, a Professor of Economics at LSE, at the College de France and at INSEAD, and a Fellow at the Econometric Society.
CPP Co-Director
Richard is Co-Director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy (CPP) and Senior Research Fellow at IFS.
CPP Co-Director, IFS Research Director
Rachel is Research Director and Professor at the University of Manchester. She was made a Dame for services to economic policy and education in 2021.
Associate Professor HEC Paris
Working Paper details
- DOI
- 10.1920/wp.ifs.2024.0824
- Publisher
- Institute for Fiscal Studies
Suggested citation
Aghion, P et al. (2024). Social skills and the individual wage growth of less educated workers. 24/08. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/social-skills-and-individual-wage-growth-less-educated-workers-0 (accessed: 19 May 2024).
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