We provide the first joint evidence on the relationship between individuals' cognitive abilities, their personality and earnings for Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, we employ scores from an ultra-short IQ-test and a set of measures of personality traits, namely locus of control, reciprocity and all basic items from the Five Factor Personality Inventory. Our estimates ...
Financial literacy predicts informed financial decisions, but what explains financial literacy? We use the concept of financial socialization and aim to represent three major agents of financial socialization: family, school and work. Thus we compile twelve relevant childhood characteristics in a new survey study and examine their relation to financial literacy, while controlling for established socio-demographic ...
In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has dropped in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the "very unhappy" and the "perfectly happy". The extension of public amenities has certainly contributed to this greater happiness homogeneity. This ...
Towards the very end of this legislative period, a cross-caucus parliamentary majority gave same-sex marriage the green light – progress for the legal equality of homosexuals in Germany. This report focuses on the life situations of homosexual and bisexual people in Germany. The careers they pursue, for example, differ from those of heterosexuals. Hourly wages are an area of significant disparity: ...
Based on a large, representative German household panel, we investigate to what extent the personality of individuals influences the entry decision into and the exit decision from self-employment. We reveal that some traits, such as openness to experience, extraversion, and risk tolerance affect entry, but different ones, such as agreeableness or different parameter values of risk tolerance, affect ...
In recent years the topic entrepreneurship has become a major focus in the social sciences, with renewed interest in the links between personality and entrepreneurship. Taking a socioecological perspective to psychology, which emphasizes the role of social habitats and their interactions with mind and behavior, we investigated regional variation in and correlates of an entrepreneurship-prone Big Five ...
The reasons why the lower educated divorce more than the higher educated in many societies today are poorly understood. Distinct divorce risks by education could be caused by variation in pressures to the couple, commitment, or relationship skills. We concentrate on the latter explanation by looking at the distribution of personality traits across society and its impact on the educational gradient ...
This article critically examines the theoretical arguments that underlie the literature linking personality traits to economic outcomes and provides empirical evidence indicating that labour market outcomes influence personality outcomes. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we investigated the extent to which gender differences occur in the processes by which highly positive and negative ...