 Good personality traits in bad times: Does conscientiousness mitigate the adverse effects of graduating in a recession?Liwen Chen and Guanghua Wang Labour Economics, 2024, vol. 91, issue C Abstract: This paper studies whether and how conscientiousness, a personality trait, helps individuals mitigate the adverse effects of graduating during a recession on early career outcomes. By analyzing college-educated individuals who graduated in the 1980s, we find that conscientiousness reduces the income losses of workers who graduated during a recession. This effect results mainly from workers’ adjustments in the labor supply. When graduating during a recession, college graduates high in conscientiousness are more likely to find full-time jobs and work more hours per week than their counterparts low in conscientiousness. Regarding the other four Big Five personality traits, while agreeableness has a modest effect on mitigating the effects of adverse labor market entry conditions on hourly wages, extraversion, openness to experience, and emotional stability do not appear to buffer against such early career losses. Additionally, cognitive ability does not offset the challenges posed by graduating during a recession. Keywords: Conscientiousness; Personality; Recession; Labor market entry; Income loss (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:labeco:v:91:y:2024:i:c:s0927537124001398 DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2024.102643 Access Statistics for this article Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier |
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