The plateauing of cognitive capacity amongst high earners

Are the best-paying jobs with the best status executed by people of nice intelligence? Previous research discover job success to extend with cognitive capacity, however don’t study how, conversely, capacity varies with job success. Stratification theories recommend that social background and cumulative benefit dominate cognitive capacity as determinants of excessive occupational success. This leads us to hypothesize that among the many comparatively profitable, common capacity is concave in revenue and status. We draw on Swedish register information containing measures of cognitive capacity and labour-market success for 59,000 males who took a obligatory army conscription check. Strikingly, we discover that the connection between capacity and wage is robust total, but above €60,000 per yr capacity plateaus at a modest degree of +1 commonplace deviation. The highest 1 per cent even rating barely worse on cognitive capacity than these within the revenue strata proper under them. We observe an identical however much less pronounced plateauing of capacity at excessive occupational status.

That’s from a new paper by Marc Keuschnigg, Arnout van de Rijt3, and Thijs Bol.