Reproducibility package for Labor Market Returns To Socio-Emotional Traits And The Impacts Of Training Programs: A Meta-Analysis

This paper synthesizes the growing evidence on the labor market returns to socio-emotional skills and the effectiveness of training programs. While existing studies document elevated returns to socio-emotional skills in the labor market, there is little consensus on which specific aspects of the skills drive these gains. Utilizing one of the established psychological measures, the Big Five Inventory (BFI) personality traits, we define relevant keywords for socio-emotional skills, web-scrape literature, and construct coefficients database on the returns and training impacts. DerSimonian and Laird random-effects estimates suggest that a one standard deviation increase in each of BFI is associated with a 1.4 to 3.1 percentage point increase in wages, with substantial heterogeneity across individual traits, demographic groups, and country income levels; among BFIs, ‘disagreeableness’ exhibits the highest wage returns (3.1 percentage points). Training programs improve BFI by up to 0.46 standard deviations (SD) overall, with larger effects for attitude-related traits such as openness (0.667 SD) and conscientiousness (0.400 SD). Although early childhood constitutes a critical period for cognitive skill formation, our evidence indicates that socio-emotional competencies remain markedly malleable in later developmental stages. Well-designed post-secondary interventions can still generate substantial gains.