Women’s Noncognitive Skills and Return to Employment After Childbirth

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of women’s noncognitive traits on the duration until return to employment after childbirth. I thus links the existing literature on the determinants of mothers ’ return to employment with the very re-cent literature on the economic consequences of noncognitive skills. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and referring to the concepts of Locus of Control and the Big Five personality traits, a discrete semi-parametric survival model with a discrete mixture distribution to account for unobserved het-erogeneity is estimated. The results confirm predictions according to which women with an external Locus of Control return to employment later than women with a more internal Locus of Control. The dimension Agreeableness of the Big Five personality traits is found to be associated with later return to employment