The Effects of Personality Traits on Adult Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Siblings

Jason Fletcher

No 6391, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: While large literatures have shown that cognitive ability and schooling increases employment and wages, an emerging literature examines the importance of so-called "non-cognitive skills" in producing labor market outcomes. However, this smaller literature has not typically used causal methods in estimating the results. One source of heterogeneity that may play an important role in producing both personality and other non-cognitive skills and labor market outcomes is family background, including genetic endowments. This paper is the first to use sibling differences to estimate the effects of personality on employment and wages and is also able to control for many other sources of heterogeneity, including attractiveness, cognitive ability, schooling, occupation, and other factors. Overall, the findings suggest that personality measures are important determinants of labor market outcomes in adulthood and that the results vary considerably by demographic group. The findings also highlight the potential role of extraversion in leading to favorable labor market outcomes, which has not been documented in many other studies.

Keywords: wages; sibling fixed effects; personality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2012-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2013, 89, 122–135

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6391.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The effects of personality traits on adult labor market outcomes: Evidence from siblings (2013)
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:dp6391

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 ().