American business is devoting a growing share of resources to identifying and developing a worker characteristic called "leadership skill". Is there such a thing, and is it rewarded in labor markets? Using the Project Talent, NLS72 and High School and Beyond datasets, we show that men who occupied leadership positions in high school earn more as adults, even when cognitive skills are held constant. The pure leadership-wage effect varies, depending on definitions and time period, from four percent to twenty-four percent, and appears to have increased over time. High-school leaders are more likely to occupy managerial occupations as adults, and leadership skills command a higher wage premium within managerial occupations than in other jobs. We find evidence that leadership skill has a component that is determined before high school, but also find evidence suggesting that it is "teachable". * We thank the Institute for Social, Behavioral and Economic Research at UC Santa Barbara and the Spencer Foundation for research support. Simon Chapple, Dan Hamermesh, Christopher Jencks, Michael Ornstein, and James Rosenbaum provided helpful comments, as did seminar participants at University of British Columbia, the 2002 meetings of the

Data linking 1972 and1992 adolescent skill endowments to adult outcomes reveal increasing complementarity between cognitive and social skills. In fact, previously noted growth in demand for cognitive skills affected only individuals with strong endowments of both social and cognitive skills. These findings are corroborated using Census and CPS data matched with Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) job task measures; employment in and earnings premia to occupations requiring high levels of both cognitive and social skill grew substantially compared with occupations that require only one or neither type of skill, and this emerging feature of the labor market has persisted into the new millennium.

Using a large sample of recent college graduates, the study tests the hypothesis that observed race and gender wage differentials reflect between-group differences in the type and quality of education attained rather than labor market discrimination. After controlling for narrowly defined college major, college grade point average, and the exact educational institution attended, white male and Hispanic male graduates earn 10 to 15 percent more per hour than comparable female, black male, or Asian male graduates.

Gender differences in "competitiveness," previously

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