“Inequality in Personality over the Life Cycle”, 2021-04-01 (; similar):
We document gender and socioeconomic inequalities in personality over the life cycle (age 18–75), using the Big Five 2 (BFI-2) inventory linked to administrative data on a large Danish population.
We estimate life-cycle profiles non-parametrically and adjust for cohort and sample-selection effects. We find that:
Women of all ages score more highly than men on all personality traits, including 3 that are positively associated with wages;
High-education groups score more favorably on Openness to Experience, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism than low-education groups, while there is no socioeconomic inequality by Conscientiousness;
Over the life cycle, gender and socioeconomic gaps remain constant, with 2 exceptions: the gender and SES gaps in Openness to Experience widen, while gender differences in Neuroticism, a trait associated with worse outcomes, diminish with age.
We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of gender wage gaps, household production models, and optimal taxation.
[Keywords: inequality, personality, Big Five-2 Inventory, life cycle dynamics, gender disadvantage, socioeconomic disadvantage]