Skills For Sustainable Development

This dissertation deals with the understanding of policies and interventions that foster human development, with a focus on children and youth, and to build a link between human development and a learning society by using an interdisciplinary approach. This thesis studies how individuals develop their learning capabilities as well as their creative, entrepreneurial, and socio-emotional skills. The dissertation is structured in three main chapters in addition to this brief introduction. The first chapter, "Affective Neuroscience meets Labor Economics: Assessing Non-Cognitive skills on Late Stage Investment on at-Risk Youth,” studies the role of a program designed to foster entrepreneurial and self-confidence through learning by failure using insights from micro-econometric, behavioral economics and applied neuroscience. The second chapter, "How Much Should We Trust Self-reported Measures of Non-cognitive Skills?,” explores the relation between transient emotional states and self-ratings on self-reported measures of socio-emotional skills using a behavioral and a neuro-physiological experiment. This chapter also works as a “proof of concept” of the methods —e.g. emotion-detection theory and lab-in-the-field experiments implemented on chapter 1. The third chapter, “Can Art-based Programs Nurture Human Capital? Evidence From Public Schools in Chile,” studies the impacts of an art-based program in high school in Chile following a quasi-experimental design using propensity score matching techniques.