The Department of Business and Management Science and NoCeT invite you to a faculty seminar with Rachel Griffith, University of Manchester.
We use matched employee–employer data from the UK to investigate the importance of social skills, in particular teamwork and communication with co-workers, as a driver of wage growth for workers with lower formal education. We find that in social skill tasks, a significant fraction of less-educated workers enjoy wage progression with tenure, and higher returns in firms with more educated co-workers. We rationalize these dynamics through a model in which social skills— initially opaque to both employee and employer—become increasingly apparent over time through complementarity with firm assets.