Are Employers Omniscient? Employer Learning About Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills

Do employers recognize noncognitive skills at the beginning of a career or is there a learning process? Does learning transfer perfectly across employers or is there a degree to which learning resets as employees change jobs throughout their careers? This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 to incorporate measures of noncognitive skills into a model of symmetric employer learning described originally by Altonji and Pierret () and nested in a model of asymmetric employer learning as in Schönberg (). I find evidence that employers reward self†esteem, internal control, and schooling initially, while rewarding cognitive skills and motivation over time.