Personality traits, the marriage market, and household behaviour

Gastón Patricio Fernández Barros and Mariia Kovaleva

No 757459, Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven

Abstract: We develop an empirical framework to analyze the dynamic effect of personality traits in marriage market patterns and intrahousehold decisions. We exploit detailed information at the individual level from the HILDA survey about consumption, labor supply, time use, and personality traits (as measured by the Big Five). First, we document that personality types are related to marital and divorce patterns, time allocated to both market and non-market labor activities, and the evolution of earn ings. To rationalize these empirical facts, we build a life-cycle model that integrates endogenous household formation and collective household choices under limited commitment. Our framework allows personality to affect both wage processes and individual preferences. In the latter, personality traits enter indirectly through household production and the utility of marriage (match quality). We use the estimates of our model to conduct counterfactuals associated with intrahousehold behavior.

Pages: 59
Date: 2024
Note: paper number DPS 24.11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Forthcoming in FEB Research Report Department of Economics

Downloads: (external link)
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/793847 Published version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:ete:ceswps:757459

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven
Bibliographic data for series maintained by library EBIB ().