Bangladesh (Nordman, Sarr, and Sharma 2019) and Latin American contexts such as Argentina and Chile (Bassi _et al._ 2012), Mexico (Campos-Vazquez 2017), Peru (Cunningham, Parra Torrado, and Sarzosa 2016), and ten of its cities (Berniell et al. 2016), confirm that both cognitive and socioemotional skills also relate to labor market outcomes but with important variations in correlations magnitude across types of skills, outcomes, and countries.

We are interested in examining whether socioemotional skills might be valued differently in the labor market of Colombia, a Latin American middle-income country. There is a range of potential reasons why it could be the case: first, due to differences in the types of employment available. As a typical country of this income level, about half of Colombia’s labor force works informally: off regulations and benefits. That could mean that informal workers with higher socioemotional skills such as resilience and social skills would do better in such adverse settings; or, on the contrary, it could mean that such labor markets have not yet produced more jobs requiring more adaptability and social skills as much as seen in the United States in the past forty years (Deming 2017). Second, due to differences in levels of human development. In Colombia, about 25 percent of the population is poor, and 40 percent is vulnerable —they have a high chance of falling back in poverty in case of a shock—, which means that most children grow up in adverse contexts that hamper their lifelong cognitive and socioemotional development (Rubio-Codina et al. 2015); there might thus be a higher premium for both types of skills if the average stock of them is low. Third, due to differences in economic growth: the estimated returns to cognitive skills are larger in countries with faster prior economic growth, suggesting that workers with higher skills are more able to adapt and gain from economic changes (Hanushek et al. 2017). This may also be the case for socioemotional skills, which are about personal and social adaptation. Finally, some cultures might reward more some skills than others. For example, a having self-confidence might be viewed positively in one country and negatively in another.

We rely on two methods, both with advantages and limitations, to estimate the extent to which measures of adults’ cognitive and socioemotional skills correlate with their contemporaneous labor market outcomes using a 2012 cross-sectional survey. We study six labor market outcomes: earnings, formality, type of occupation (i.e., high- versus low- and medium-skilled), employment, being active or studying, and tertiary education attainment.<sup>3</sup> Our first method uses standard ordinary least square (OLS) and logit regressions on our raw measure of cognitive skills, a test score that capture the ability to understand and reason from texts, and eight measures of socioemotional skills, survey-based measures of the Big Five

> 3 High- and low- and medium-skilled occupations are categorization of ILO’s 1988 classification of occupations. High-skilled ones include senior officials and managers, professionals, and technicians while low- and middle-skilled ones includes occupations such as clerks, service workers, machine operators, and laborers.

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