First impressions matter for life : the contribution of skills for the first job

This paper develops a model which provides a characterization of the joint distribution of the duration of search, accepted wages and skills with unobserved heterogeneity based on Eckstein and Wolpin (1995). We aim to estimate the effect of cognitive and socio-emotional skills on first job wages and duration of job search. Observed and unobserved heterogeneity are exploited as sources of identification. The data is drawn from the 2010 ENHAB which has not been used for this purpose before and which contains full retrospective information on first job outcomes and children. The model is estimated through a maximization of the joint Likelihood. Preliminary results regarding wages show that socio-emotional skills are the most valued among high skilled individuals, whereas cognitive skills are the most valued among low skilled individuals. Predicted wages for type I individuals are always above the observed wage, for every schooling level. Regarding duration of first job search, results show that the socio-emotional high skilled individual receives more job offers than the cognitive high skilled with the same schooling level.