Talented individuals are seen as drivers of long-term growth, but how do they realize their full potential? In this paper, I show that even in a group of high-IQ men and women, lifetime earnings are substantially influenced by their education and personality traits. I identify a previously...

We study how children's socio-emotional skills and well-being in adolescence are affected by an increase in the duration of parental care during infancy. Exploiting a Danish reform that extended paid parental leave in 2002 and effectively delayed children's entry into formal out-of-home care, we...

We describe gender and socioeconomic inequalities in the Big Five personality traits over the life cycle, using a facet-level inventory linked to administrative data. We estimate life-cycle profiles non-parametrically and test for cohort and sample-selection effects. We discuss the economic...

Is the education-health gradient inflated because both education and health are associated with unobserved socio-emotional skills? Revisiting the literature, we find that the gradient is reduced by 30-45% by fine-grained personality facets and Locus of Control. Traditional aggregated Big-Five...

This paper studies the interaction between parental and public inputs in children's skill formation. We perform a longer-run follow-up study of a randomized controlled trial that increased preschool quality and initially improved skills significantly for children of all backgrounds. There is,...