Economist and Senior Researcher at Mathematica
I study social and emotional skills, sometimes called noncognitive skills. These are skills like perseverance and self-control that help people succeed in education, employment, and life. My work looks at which skills matter, how to measure them, and how schools and programs can improve them.
I have worked on these questions for more than a decade. I design experiments, build new measures, and analyze administrative data. Much of my job is leading research teams and making findings useful for policymakers and practitioners.
Affiliations
Success in school and work depends on more than test scores. My research asks three questions about social and emotional skills: Which ones matter? How can we measure them well? And how can schools and programs help people build them?
Showing how skills like perseverance and self-control shape success in school, at work, and in life, sometimes as much as test scores do.
Building practical ways to measure these skills, and showing where common tools like student surveys can go wrong.
Testing whether programs in schools and job training actually build these skills.
Working with school districts and government agencies to put this evidence into practice.
Selected publications on skills development, education, and employment.
Kautz, Tim and Wladimir Zanoni
Journal of Human Capital, 18(2): 272-303
In brief: A Chicago program that teaches skills like perseverance raised college enrollment by 10 to 20 percentage points, and improved skills explain part of the effect.
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Feng, Shuaizhang, Yujie Han, James J. Heckman, and Tim Kautz
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(6): e2113992119
In brief: Teachers' ratings of children's skills were more consistent and better at predicting later outcomes than ratings from the children or their parents.
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Milkman, Katherine L., Dena Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, ... Tim Kautz, ... and Angela L. Duckworth
Nature, 600: 478-483
In brief: Testing 54 nudges at once on more than 60,000 gym members showed which small interventions actually get people to exercise more.
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Heckman, James J., John Eric Humphries, and Tim Kautz (Editors)
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press
In brief: Achievement tests like the GED miss character skills that matter as much as knowledge for success in school, work, and life.
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Tim Kautz
