Eva M. Berger
The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of noncognitive traits for the duration of women's career breaks after first childbirth. It thus links the existing literature on the determinants of mothers' return to employment with the very recent literature on the economic role of noncognitive skills. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and referring to the concepts of Locus of Control and the Big Five personality traits, a discrete semi-parametric survival model is estimated incorporating a discrete mixture distribution to summarize unobserved individual heterogeneity. The estimation results confirm predictions according to which women with a highly external Locus of Control return to employment later than women with a more internal Locus of Control. Within the Big Five personality traits, the dimension Agreeableness is further found to be associated with a late transition to employment.
Themen: Arbeit und Beschäftigung
JEL-Classification: J22;J24
Keywords: Noncognitive skills, personality, maternal employment, female labor supply, survival analysis
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