Personality, IQ, and Lifetime Earnings

By Miriam Gensowski. Social Science Research Network, 2018

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper estimates the effects of personality traits and IQ on lifetime earnings of the men and women of the Terman study, a high-IQ U.S. sample. Age-by-age earnings profiles allow a study of when personality traits affect earnings most, and for whom the effects are strongest. I document a concave life-cycle pattern in the payoffs to personality traits, with the largest effects between the ages of 40 and 60. An interaction of traits with education reveals that personality matters most for highly educated men. The largest effects are found for Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness (negative), where Conscientiousness operates partly through education, which also has significant returns.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/39eebc4435c1da8dc12484098ff2d716048461e4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

In Economics and Econometrics

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Fostering and Measuring Skills: Interventions that Improve Character and Cognition (2013, background): “…DeVoss, Fuller, Lee Kelley, Lima, Marshall, Moore, Raubenheimer, Ruch, Willoughby, Benson Wyman, and Hazeltine Yates (1925) shows that personality skills predict life outcomes (see also Murray, 1938; Terman, Oden, Bayley, Marshall, McNemar, and Sullivan, 1947; and the analysis in Gensowski, 2012).”
Hard evidence on soft skills (2012, background): “, 1947; and the discussion in Gensowski, 2012). 7 See Mischel (1968). Some behavioral economists share this view.”