Origins of Adulthood Personality: The Role of Adverse Childhood Experiences

Jason Fletcher and Stefanie Schurer

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2017, vol. 17, issue 2, 22

Abstract: We test whether adverse childhood experiences – exposure to parental maltreatment and its indirect effect on health – are associated with age 30 personality traits. We use rich longitudinal data from a large, representative cohort of young US Americans and exploit the differences across siblings to control for the confounding influences of shared environmental and genetic factors. We find that maltreatment experiences are significantly and robustly associated with neuroticism, conscientiousness, and openness to experience, but not with agreeableness and extraversion. High levels of neuroticism are linked to sexual abuse and neglect; low levels of conscientiousness and openness to experience are linked to parental neglect. The estimated associations are significantly reduced in magnitude when controlling for physical or mental health, suggesting that adolescent health could be one important pathway via which maltreatment affects adulthood personality. Maltreatment experiences, in combination with their health effects, explain a significant fraction of the relationship between adulthood conscientiousness and earnings or human capital. Our findings provide a possible explanation for why personality traits are important predictors of adulthood labor market outcomes.

Keywords: human capital; noncognitive skills; Big Five personality traits; adverse childhood experiences; maltreatment; siblings fixed effects; Add Health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/bejeap-2015-0212 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Working Paper: Origins of adulthood personality: The role of adverse childhood experiences (2017)
Working Paper: Origins of Adulthood Personality: The Role of Adverse Childhood Experiences (2017)
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:bpj:bejeap:v:17:y:2017:i:2:p:22:n:1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/bejeap/html

DOI: 10.1515/bejeap-2015-0212

Access Statistics for this article

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy is currently edited by Hendrik Jürges and Sandra Ludwig

More articles in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().