# **Conclusion**

Using a cross-sectional data set, we find that Colombian adults with the higher levels of both cognitive and socioemotional skills are also those who have better labor market outcomes and have attended tertiary education, seemingly for different reasons for each type of skill. We use two methods, one showing specific but potentially noisy measures of skills and another showing more accurate estimations of people’s actual skills but bundled in one dimension, one for each type of skill. We find that adults with higher cognitive skills are especially more likely to have a job that is better paid, formal, and high-skilled and have attended tertiary education because cognitive skills are highly linked to schooling—children with higher cognitive skills are more likely to do well in school and pursue education, and in turn develop more cognitive skills. Adults with socioemotional skills are particularly more likely to have a productive activity, either work, look actively for a job, or study as opposed to being idle. Socioemotional skills, although they are partly linked with schooling, appear to be built and influence outcomes beyond schooling, especially for labor force participation and tertiary-education attendance, in particular for subgroups such as women, youth, and less educated adults. Adults with the highest levels of both types tend to do better than those who have the highest levels in one or the other. The general importance and channels of cognitive and socioemotional skills seem broadly consistent with evidence from high-income countries. Although with our data we can neither assess how specific skills are differently rewarded in Colombia nor why.

The interpretation of our results should take into account two main empirical challenges: measurement error and reverse causality. First, while our structural estimations of latent skills solve the biases due to noisy survey-based measures of socioemotional skills, the method applied to our data comes at the cost of only being able to estimate a single factor for cognitive and socioemotional skills, each, due to its high data requirements. As such, we cannot observe the possible diverse influence of a range of socioemotional skills on labor market outcomes. Second, because we use a cross-sectional survey in which skills and outcomes are measured at the same time, it is possible that better outcomes also cause higher skills. The link between openness to experience (curiosity and creativity) with tertiary-education attendance might be both the result of more opened youth being eager to study at this level and that they have been through that kind of education raised their openness. For these reasons, our estimates are best interpreted as conditional correlations controlling for confounding factors, rather than causal effects.

The results of this paper may have important policy implications. Although in different ways, both cognitive and socioemotional skills are linked to outcomes and strategies to foster them may be well advised. For example, the curriculum of training programs aiming to raise youth and adults’ employment outcomes may combine modules of both cognitive and socioemotional skills. Since the formation of both types of skills is cumulative and start from early childhood, policies to foster them before youth get to 33