Welcome!

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at Aalto University and Helsinki GSE. During the academic year 2023/2024 I visited the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.

My research interests are primarily in labor economics and the economics of education. 

You can find my CV here 

E-mail: jerry.montonen[a]aalto.fi

I am on the 2025/2026 Job Market!

JOB MARKET PAPER

Shaping Young Minds: The Effects of Teachers on Socio-Emotional Skills

Abstract: Socio-emotional skills are key drivers of wages, yet little is known about how they are produced. This paper estimates the impact of teachers on socio-emotional skills and the labor market returns of these effects. In the first part of the paper, I demonstrate that teachers play a significant role in shaping students' socio-emotional skills, as measured by a standardized personality test from which I extract indices of extroversion and conscientiousness. A one standard deviation improvement in both extroversion and conscientiousness teacher value-added leads to an approximately 0.07 standard deviation increase in both of these measures for their students. Test score value-added only weakly correlates with extroversion and conscientiousness value-added, which implies that current test score-based measures of teacher effectiveness fail to capture critical dimensions of teacher quality. Next, I show that these skills have large labor market returns using earnings data covering all graduates. Exposure to a one standard deviation higher conscientiousness value-added teacher leads to 1.2% higher earnings between ages 30-35, exceeding the earnings effect of test score value-added.  In the final part of the paper, I provide suggestive evidence showing that teacher training matters for all dimensions of value-added, suggesting that we can train more effective teachers.

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