Borghans, Lex, Bas ter Weel, and Bruce A. Weinberg. 2008. “Interpersonal Styles and Labor Market Outcomes.” Journal of Human Resources 43(4): 815–858.
This paper develops a framework of the role of interpersonal interactions in the labor market. Effective interpersonal interactions involve caring and directness. The ability to perform these tasks varies with personality and the importance of these tasks varies across jobs. An assignment model shows that people are most productive in jobs that match their style. An oversupply of one attribute relative to the other reduces wages for people who are better with the attribute in greater supply. We present evidence that youth sociability affects job assignment in adulthood. The returns to interpersonal interactions are consistent with the assignment model.
Lex Borghans is a professor of labor economics and social policy at Maastricht University and the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA), Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Bas ter Weel is the department head of the international economics department with the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis in The Hague and senior researcher at the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT), Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Bruce Weinberg is associate professor of economics at Ohio State University and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The authors wish to thank three referees of this journal for very helpful comments. In addition, they are grateful to David Autor, Francine Blau, Nicole Fortin, Daniel Hamermesh, Masanori Hashimoto, James Heckman, Hajime Miyazaki, Joan Muysken, Derek Neal, Robert Roe and Bas Straathof for helpful comments and discussions. Participants at the EALE, the IZA/SOLE Meeting, Maastricht University, and the NBER Summer Institute are gratefully acknowledged for their comments. The authors wish to thank ESRC SKOPE and Francis Green for making available the BSS data. They would like to thank Alexandra Spitz-Oener for help with the German data. Ter Weel acknowledges financial support from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and Weinberg acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation. Part of this work was done while Borghans and Ter Weel were visiting the Department of Economics at Ohio State University and while Weinberg was visiting MERIT and ROA at Maastricht University. The authors are grateful for their hospitality and support. The data used in his article can be obtained beginning May 2009 through April 2012 from Lex Borghans, Department of Economics, PO Box 616, 6200 MD, the Netherlands <lex.borghans@algec.unimaas.nl>.