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Introduction
Despite the important role that human capital occupies in economic thinking, its non-observable nature has historically limited its measurement. Since the original works by Becker (1962) and Mincer (1970, 1974), years of schooling has remained as the predominant measure of human capital. It was with the improvement in testing techniques and after the works by Hanushek, Woessmann and their coauthors (see Hanushek and Woessmann 2008, 2011, among others) that the use of international standardized achievement tests started to be seen as a more adequate measure of human capital. As argued by Hanushek and Woessmann (2008) achievement tests provide a better measure of human capital than years of schooling because (1) they better capture skills acquired out of the classroom and (2) because there is substantial cross-country variation in skills acquired at each level of education. Nowadays, there is a growing attention towards the distinction between two different types of skills that are embedded in human capital, namely cognitive and non-cognitive skills. A better understanding of the importance of human capital requires the construction of measures that distinguish between these two types of skills.
We understand by cognitive skills individuals’ knowledge on basic competences, such as numeracy and literacy. Non-cognitive skills (also known as soft skills or socio-emotional skills) are individual patterns of behaviors, attitudes and personality that are not directly related to individuals’ knowledge. Recent research has found that this distinction is important when studying the relationship between human capital and economic outputs both at an individual (Duckworth et al. 2011; Kautz et al. 2014; Heckman and Rubinstein 2001; Heckman et al. 2006, 2010) as well as at an aggregate level (Brunello and Schlotter 2011). At the same time, as noted by Cunha et al. (2010), the type of interventions required to foster cognitive and non-cognitive skills are notably different which intensifies the necessity of a better understanding of the role of each type of skills for policy recommendations.1
The main challenge for the study of non-cognitive skills is often the availability of proper measures. This is not the case for cognitive skills. The evaluation of cognitive skills notably improved during the last decades of the twentieth century, thanks to the advance in testing techniques. This fostered the emergence of standardized achievement tests allowing...