Human Capital Development: New Evidence on the Production of Socio-Emotional Skills
76 Pages Posted: 27 Oct 2020 Last revised: 16 Apr 2023
Abstract
We estimate a dynamic model of multidimensional human capital development from childhood through adolescence and into early adulthood for a Peruvian cohort born in 1994. We exploit multiple measures of cognitive and socio-emotional skills and a latent factor structure to estimate flexible skills production functions between the ages of 8 and 22. We focus particularly on socio-emotional skill development, and provide the first estimates of such skill production over such a long period in a developing country context. In the last period, when individuals reach adulthood at age 22, we show that socio-emotional skills can be separated into two distinct domains - social skills and task effectiveness skills- which develop differently especially with regard to time use and cross-productivity with cognition. We find that individuals with higher task effectiveness are less likely to have engaged in risky behaviours such as smoking, taking drugs, and engaging with gangs.
Keywords: dynamic factor analysis, child development, human capital, socio-emotional skills
JEL Classification: C38, J13, J24, O15, O54
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