Working for Nothing: Personality and Time Allocation in the UK

Marina Della Giusta () and Sarah Jewell

No 14971, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We contribute to the literature on the effects of personality traits on labour market outcomes focusing on time mismanagement as an underlying mechanism. We document differences in time allocation to the labour market by different personality types in the UK and show how they may account for some of the labour market disadvantage experienced by more neurotic types (and the advantage experienced by more conscientious types) focussing in particular on unpaid overtime. We make use of the first ten waves of the Understanding Society Survey and show that particular personality types are more prone to working longer hours and experiencing time pressures. Whilst the effect of most personality traits is consistent with a rational theory of time allocation, we also find that neuroticism is instead associated with inconsistent behaviour (working fewer paid and more unpaid hours) and discuss implications for both labour market discrimination and labour supply theory.

Keywords: labour supply; overtime; time; time allocation; personality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 D01 J22 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2021-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14971.pdf (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:iza:izadps:dp14971

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().