The Economics and Psychology of Personality Traits

By Lex Borghans, Angela L. Duckworth, James J. Heckman, B. ter Weel. The Journal of human resources, 2008

385 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper explores the interface between personality psychology and economics. We examine the predictive power of personality and the stability of personality traits over the life cycle. We develop simple analytical frameworks for interpreting the evidence in personality psychology and suggest promising avenues for future research.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, General Decision Sciences, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c9cc18de3c1269b24151785b29b8cab7ac39474b

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

1. Alex M. Wood
2. C. Boyce
3. M. van Praag
4. Laura Huber
5. Randolph Sloof

In General Decision Sciences

1. M. van Praag
2. Laura Huber
3. Alex M. Wood
4. Randolph Sloof
5. C. Boyce

In Social Psychology

1. C. Boyce
2. Alex M. Wood
3. M. van Praag
4. John Maltby
5. S. Joseph

Citations in the corpus

• Risk aversion relates to cognitive ability: Preferences or Noise? (2016, neutral): “23 Borghans et al. (2008) conclude that personality traits and cognitive ability are interrelated, but that it is possible to econometrically separate them.”
• Deciding to Decide: Gender, Leadership and Risk-Taking in Groups (2010, neutral): “The paper also contributes to the recent endeavor of exploring the correlation of economic decisions with personality measures (see Borghans et al. (2008)).”
• Teacher Quality and Learning Outcomes in Kindergarten (2016, neutral): “15 Measurement error is a concern for both the IQ and Big Five tests (see Borghans et al. 2008 for a discussion).”
• Hard evidence on soft skills (2012, neutral): “…that depend on a single trait or ability gives rise to a fundamental identification problem that is typically ignored in empirical research investigating how psychological traits affect outcomes.31 28 See Borghans et al. (2008a) and Almlund et al. (2011) for a comparison of these taxonomies.”
• Other Regarding Preferences: A Selective Survey of Experimental Results (2012, neutral): “The Effect of Cognitive Ability and the Big Five Personality Characteristics in OtherRegarding Behavior There is growing interest in economics on the effects of personality traits as measured in the psychology literature on economic outcomes (Borghans et al., 2008; Anderson et al., 2011).”
• Personality trait differences between traditional and social entrepreneurs (2014, neutral): “…stemming from an individual’s psychological core (Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters, 2004; Hollander, 1971), whilst others argue that behaviours and traits evolve over an individual’s lifespan, taking into account age, experience, and opportunity (Borghans et al., 2008; Roberts and Caspi, 2003).”
• The Labor Market Returns to Cognitive and Noncognitive Ability: Evidence from the Swedish Enlistment (2011, neutral): “Compared to IQ tests, such measures are less reliable and less precise (Borghans et al., 2008b).”
• The Economic Value of Social and Emotional Learning (2015, neutral): “For the last category – attitudes – it is very difficult to derive shadow prices (Heckman and Kautz, 2012; Borghans et al., 2008).”
• The Gender Pay Gap Beyond Human Capital (2011, neutral): “First, no consensus exists about what constitutes noncognitive skills or how to measure them (see Borghans et al. 2008).”