Personality traits (also called noncognitive skills) are an important predictor for many economic outcomes and indicators of wellbeing, such as labor force participation, income, and health. While it is well established that personality changes during childhood and can be influenced by interventions, much less is known about whether personality is malleable during young adulthood. This is because of the difficulty of separating correlation and causal effects for a period of life where there are few controlled or natural experiments available.
In this research, we empirically investigate whether marriage during young adulthood affects personality. To separate selection into marriage by personality from a causal effect of marriage in young adulthood on personality, we use as identification strategy the sharp decrease in marriage rates in East Germany induced by the German reunification.