Personality Traits Across the Life Cycle: Disentangling Age, Period, and Cohort Effects

Bernd Fitzenberger, Gary Mena, Jan Nimczik and Uwe Sunde

No 1153, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract: Economists increasingly recognise the importance of personality traits for socio-economic outcomes, but little is known about the stability of these traits over the life cycle. Existing empirical contributions typically focus on age patterns and disregard cohort and period influences. This paper contributes novel evidence for the separability of age, period, and cohort effects for a broad range of personality traits based on systematic specification tests for disentangling age, period and cohort influences. Our estimates document that for different cohorts, the evolution of personality traits across the life cycle follows a stable, though non-constant, age profile, while there are sizeable differences across time periods.

Keywords: Big Five Personality Traits; Locus of Control; Risk Attitudes; Age-Period-Cohort Decomposition; Life Cycle (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 p.
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-cbe, nep-hrm and nep-rmg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.831926.de/diw_sp1153.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Personality Traits Across the Life Cycle: Disentangling Age, Period and Cohort Effects (2022)
Working Paper: Personality Traits Across the Life Cycle: Disentangling Age, Period, and Cohort Effects (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp1153

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