Performance of Young Adults: The Importance of Different Skills

This article uses teacher assessments at age 16 in Norwegian comprehensive schools to estimate the relationship between different types of skills and performance of young adults. While we follow the literature and consider grades in Mathematics and Science as proxy for cognitive skills, we use a novel measure for another type of skills; performance in behavioral and practical subjects. Using individual register data, we find that both types of skills are important predictors of high school graduation. For longer term outcomes, we find that non-cognitive skills is the most important predictor of the probability to receive welfare benefits at age 22, whereas cognitive skills is most important for the probability to start college.