Presentation :

Skills have long been understood to be a critical component of a person's endowment. They play an important role in social inclusion, through educational attainment, aspirations, occupational choices, earnings, and formation and use of social networks. While skills are inherently a multidimensional concept, only recently have economists started to look beyond formal education and to focus on other factors such as cognitive (numeracy and literacy) and non-cognitive skills (motivation, leadership, openness to experience, self-esteem, social skills, etc.). Exploring the role of cognitive and non-cognitive skills in the rural Indian context is especially interesting due to the predominance of a societal system, which is guiding economic and social interactions. Up to now, the role of non-cognitive skills has been evaluated in isolation of the external environment by purely focusing on their effects on individual choices and preferences, thereby neglecting the social structures in which the individuals evolve. In this presentation, from a newly collected household survey in rural Tamil Nadu, which measures what one usually neglects in the case of a developing country such as India, we will present original evidence of the role of cognitive and non-cognitive skills in labour market outcomes and social network formation and use.