Personality Traits, Self-Employment, and Professions

Michael Fritsch () and Alina Rusakova
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Alina Sorgner

No 343, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract: We investigate the effect of broad personality traits - the Big Five - on an individual's decision to become self-employed. In particular, we test an overall indicator of the entrepreneurial personality. Since we find that the level of selfemployment varies considerably across professions, we also perform the analysis for different types of professions, namely, those classified as being in the "creative class" as compared to the noncreative class. The analysis is based on micro data for individuals of the German Socio Economic Panel (SOEP). We find a significant association between personality traits and the propensity be become self-employed. However, the strengthof this link is fairly weak and differs across professions, indicating an important effect of an individual's profession on his or her decision to run an own business.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; self-employment; personality traits; the Big Five; professions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D3 L26 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 p.
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.366336.de/diw_sp0343.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Personality Traits, Self-Employment, and Professions (2010)
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:diw:diwsop:diw_sp343

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().