Unemployment Duration and Noncognitive Skills

This paper focuses on the role of noncognitive skills play in determining the suc-cess of unemployed workers finding and keeping a job. We argue that a worker’s job search intensity not only relies on the conventional determinants discussed in the job search literature but is also decisively driven by her noncognitive skills, reflected in her propensity to motivate and control herself while searching for a job. Moreover, personality traits, in as far as they can be signaled to a potential employer, may also enhance the probability of receiving and accepting a job offer. For our econometric duration analysis we use the well-accepted taxonomy “Big Five ” for classifying personality traits. Based on individual unemployment data taken from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) our empirical findings reveal that the personality traits Conscientiousness and Neuroticism have a strong positive im-pact on the probability of finding a job and on the duration of the subsequent em-ployment. We do not find any significant effects of the personality traits Extraversion and Agreeableness on the duration of unemployment. The personality traitOpenness eases finding a job only for unemployed workers with migration background, but it does not affect the duration of the following employment