Explaining personality pay gaps in the UK

Cheti Nicoletti and Alita Nandi

No 2009-22, ISER Working Paper Series from Institute for Social and Economic Research

Abstract: Using the British Household Panel Survey we examine how the Big Five personality traits - openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism - affect wages. We estimate mean and quantile pay gaps between people with low and high levels of each of the Big Five, and decompose these pay gaps in the part explained by differences in workers’ characteristics and in the residual unexplained part. We find that openness to experience is the most relevant personality trait followed by neuroticism, agreeableness and extroversion. Openness and extroversion are rewarded while agreeableness and neuroticism are penalized.

Date: 2009-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Published

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/fi ... ers/iser/2009-22.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Explaining personality pay gaps in the UK (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ese:iserwp:2009-22

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Publications Office, Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ UK
https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/publications/

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISER Working Paper Series from Institute for Social and Economic Research Publications Office, Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jonathan Nears ().