A focus on the link between noncognitive skills and labor market outcomes may be particularly useful in fostering household enterprise development and addressing youth employment challenges in fragile settings. This is so for three reasons. First, a large share of youth in fragile contexts missed out on early childhood interventions and failed to complete the formative years of education, which cannot easily be offset because the early years are critical in shaping cognitive and noncognitive abilities (Heckman 2008; Heckman and Masterov 2007). Nonetheless, noncognitive skills have been shown to be more malleable at later ages than cognitive skills, and enhancing the former may therefore help reduce deficits suffered earlier in life, including by increasing cognitive ability through cross‐fertilization (Kautz et al. 2014).

Second, criminality among youth, an important concern in fragile settings, may be reduced by enhancing noncognitive ability, which is a strong predictor of violent and risky behaviors (Heckman, Stixrud, and Urzua 2006).<sup>2</sup> However, the collection of direct measures of impacts on these traits is still relatively rare in evaluations even of programs explicitly aiming to influence noncognitive skills (Sánchez Puerta, Valerio, and Gutiérrez Bernal 2016).

Third, the evidence on whether interventions that increase noncognitive abilities can affect employment outcomes is still limited (Blattman and Ralston 2015). Given that the vast majority of youth in these contexts are engaged in low‐productivity activities, increasing noncognitive abilities could potentially lead to large economic gains to the extent that boosting these abilities improves productivity (Filmer and Fox 2014). Although most evidence on such links points to an association rather than a causal relationship, it is emerging that noncognitive skills are not only valued in the labor market, but are better than the intelligence quotient as a predictor of educational attainment and labor market success.<sup>3</sup> <mark>Household enterprises, especially those operating at subsistence, may be more exposed to aggregate shocks than bigger and more well established businesses. E</mark> xternal shocks can negatively affect entrepreneurial profitability if managerial ability is low (Mano et al. 2012) <mark>. The vulnerability of enterprises to shocks is an acute problem in fragile contexts, where subsistence businesses make up the majority of entrepreneurial activity (S</mark> choar <mark>2010). H</mark> owever, research on shocks in low‐income settings has mainly focused on the effects of negative events on consumption, expenditure, and agricultural income‐ generating activities; there is little evidence on the impact of shocks on nonfarm household enterprises (Hallegatte et al. 2016). Skills training associated with a small cash injection can enhance the short‐ and long‐term ability of households to respond to shocks through at least three channels: (i) avoiding coping strategies that reduce consumption in the face of income and asset losses, (ii) allowing participants to diversify revenue, and (iii) building human capital relevant for business operations (Grimm, Knorringa, and Lay 2012; Hallegatte et al. 2017). <mark>Enabling physical and human capital investments and avoiding resource depletion may raise value added, which helps businesses adjust to shocks and graduate from s</mark> ubsistence <mark>(Bruton, Ahlstrom, and Si 2015; Grimm,</mark> Knorringa, and Lay <mark>2012).</mark> Using evidence from a randomized control trial of a skills intervention targeting youth in Sierra Leone, this paper seeks to contribute to the literature on youth employment opportunities through household enterprises in three ways. First, it seeks to contribute to a growing body of evidence aimed at identifying skills interventions that can be effective in improving household enterprise development and employment and to examine how gender may mediate the impact of these programs on labor market outcomes. Second,

> 2 See Blattman and Ralston (2015) for a review of the literature; Blattman and Annan (2015) for evidence on Liberia.

> 3 See Kautz et al. (2014) for a review of this evidence; Díaz, Arias, and Tudela (2012) for evidence on Peru.

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