Abstract

We investigate the association between social and interpersonal skills measured early in life and adult labour-market outcomes. We use data from the 1970 British Cohort Study, which contains teachers' reports of child emotional and behavioural problems at age 10. We perform a novel analysis of these teachers' reports and show that they identify four main skill dimensions, which we label as problems of `attention’, `conduct’, `emotion’ and with `peers’. We then show that these dimensions align closely with the main sub-scales from the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire, recently adopted in many large social surveys as the main instrument to identify emotional and behavioural problems in children and adolescents. Conditional on a range of confounding variables, we find that conduct problems, driven by aggression and impulsivity, are associated with positive outcomes in the labour market: higher wages, higher labour supply, sorting into `good’ jobs and higher productivity conditional on job tasks. Attention problems are instead negatively associated with labour market outcomes and this relationship is partially mediated by schooling. Emotional and peer problems have overall negative effects, but these are not large in magnitude in most cases. We explore different mediating pathways through relevant teen characteristics - career interests, socialization and mental health - but none of these is able to fully explain the association between early skills and later economic outcomes.