| Catherine Weinberger
University of California, Santa Barbara
High school leadership skills and adult labor market outcomes
FINAL REPORT:
Leadership Skills and Wages
American business is devoting a significant and increasing amount of resources to identifying and developing a worker characteristic called "leadership skill". Is there such a thing, and is it rewarded in labor markets? Using the Project Talent, NLS72 and High School and Beyond datasets, the authors show that men who occupied leadership positions in high school earn more as adults, even when cognitive skills are held constant. The pure leadership-wage effect varies, depending on definitions and time period, from four percent to thirty-three percent. This effect is not an artifact of measurement error in cognitive skills or differences in a wide array of other physical or psychological traits. High school leaders are more likely to occupy managerial occupations as adults, and leadership skills command a higher wage premium within managerial occupations than in other jobs. Finally, the authors found some evidence that, rather than being completely determined before high school entry, leadership skills are fostered by exposure to leadership opportunities during high school.
Are There Racial Gaps in High School Leadership Opportunities?
Recent research suggests that exposure to leadership opportunities via school-sponsored extracurricular activities can foster the development of leadership skills, resulting in a wage premium that persists into adulthood. A meticulous analysis compares the proportion of high school seniors engaged in leadership roles across five cohorts (1960-2004), by race and gender. In stark contrast to the racial disadvantage found in other measures of school achievement, this analysis of high school leadership development finds few historical examples of racial disadvantage across a wide range of high school leadership and group activities Very recently, black women have become somewhat underrepresented (relative to white women) in both sports and other leadership roles. Meanwhile, leadership participation rates of black and white men followed very similar time paths.
Quantifying the Growing Importance of "Soft Skills" in the Labor Market
The importance to labor market outcomes of an individual worker's "soft skills" (including leadership, communication, and other interpersonal skills) has been firmly established. A more elusive claim -- that the relative importance of soft skills is growing over time -- is currently supported primarily by anecdotal evidence. A model developed by Autor, Levy & Murnane posits that computerization has enhanced the productivity of those who engage in complex communications or problem-solving tasks. Consistent with their model, they document a shift in the composition of jobs, with growing employment in jobs that tend to require complex interpersonal interactions or analytic tasks. An additional step in the process of documenting a shift in demand is to show that the wage premium to individuals with these skills has risen as employment has grown. This has already been accomplished for cognitive problem-solving skills, as captured by scores on standardized math tests. The remaining challenge is to identify convincing, standardized measures of an individual worker's pre-labor market stock of soft skills. In this analysis, individual-level information about the participation of successive cohorts of high school students in specific group activities is used to construct uniform measures, and to show that the wage premium associated with interpersonal skills is indeed growing.
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