Non-Cognitive Skills and Self Employment
Publication Date
1-1-2015
Grant Type
Early Career Research Award
Description
Recent work has connected non-cognitive skills and personality traits to self employment. This type of research is motivated by the possibility of linking successful entrepreneurship to a set of measurable and fairly modifiable factors. The proposed research will add to this literature. My key departure from earlier work is that I will consider two skills that are measured during childhood and that capture maladjustment and misbehavior. My focus on these skills is motivated by recent findings in Papageorge, Ronda, and Zheng (2014). In that paper, the authors document how one of the two skills in question, known as externalizing behavior (and linked to aggression), though it lowers schooling attainment and raises the likelihood of being arrested during adulthood, has a positive impact on earnings and also predicts entry into self employment. These patterns not only raise the possibility of identifying entrepreneurs at very young ages. They also suggest that a factor that drives entrepreneurship is penalized in school.
Grant Product
Genes, Education, and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study
Upjohn Institute Working Paper No. 17-273, 2017
Papageorge, Nicholas W. and Kevin Thom. "Genes, Education, and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study." National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 25114, 2018. https://doi.org/10.3386/w25114