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The Importance of Social Skills in Recovery from Graduating in a Recession

Tue, Nov 24, 2020

Time: 12:00-13:00, Nov. 26th, 2020 Thursday

Venue:Tongji Building Block A Room 505

Speaker:Sun Hyung Kim, Associate Professor, Shanghai University

Abstract:

I study the impacts of cognitive and social skills on labor market outcomes associated with graduating from college during a recession. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 whose respondents graduated from college between 1979 and 1989, I estimate the effects of economic conditions at time of college graduation on labor market outcomes for the first three decades of a career. I find that workers with higher cognitive skills are more likely to be employed and have higher-quality employment, while those with higher social skills switch jobs more often. Graduating in a worse economy intensifies these roles of both skills for a prolong period of time so that more skilled graduates suffer less from graduating in recessions. I document that the different roles of cognitive and social skills in workers’ careers explain a large degree of heterogeneity in the costs of labor market shocks. Workers with higher cognitive skills have more persistent earning loss, due to negative shocks at labor market entry, compared to workers with higher social skills. This is because workers with higher social skills are able to switch to better firms and increase job match quality through job mobility.

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