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Abstract in English:
Despite indications that people skills are important for understanding individual labor-marketoutcomes and have become more important over the last decades, there is little analysis byeconomists. This paper shows that people skills are important determinants of labor-marketoutcomes, including occupations and wages. We show that technological and organizational changeshave increased the importance of people skills in the workplace. We particularly focus on how theincreased importance of people skills has affected the labor-market outcomes of under representedgroups. We show that the acceleration rate of increase in the importance of people skills betweenthe late 1970s and early 1990s can help explain why women’s wages increased more rapidly whilethe wages of blacks grew more slowly over these years relative to earlier years
Open Access? Yes
Journal NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES
Publication Year 2006
Volume Working Paper 11985
Publisher NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH