This study examined the long-standing question of whether a person’s position among siblings has a lasting impact on that person’s life course. Empirical research on the relation between birth order and intelligence has convincingly documented that performances on psychometric intelligence...

People typically update their beliefs about their own abilities too little in response to feed-back, a phenomenon known as "conservatism", and some studies suggest that they overweight good relative to bad signals ("asymmetry"). We measure individual conservatism and asymmetry in three tasks...

Web surveys technically allow providing feedback to respondents based on their previous responses. This personalized feedback may not only be used to target follow-up questions, it also allows test results to be returned immediately to respondents. This paper argues that the possibility of...

We investigate whether the Big Five Personality Dimensions contribute to explaining gender and migrant wage gaps by using a linked employer-employee dataset. We expand the scarce literature concerning personality traits and gender wage gaps in Germany and we provide first evidence for the...

This paper analyzes private retirement savings, the amount for German individuals and how these savings are influenced by personality traits. With the 2002 to 2009 cross section of the Socio-Economic Panel for Germany (SOEP), it is investigated how the Big-Five and the Locus of Control influence...

Using two datasets containing demographically representative samples of the Dutch population, I study how lifetime experiences of aggregate labor market conditions affect personality. Three sets of findings are reported. First, experienced aggregate unemployment is negatively correlated with the...

We argue that entrepreneurial choice proceeds in at least in two steps, with vocational choice nearly always preceding choice of employment status, whether that be self-employment or dependent employment. Since the two decisions are interrelated, analysis of entrepreneurial choice as a single...

Although universal childcare has become an essential tool to support child development, few economic studies analyze its effects on non-cognitive skills and little is known about causal effects on these skills in the long run. In this paper we go beyond short run analyses and examine the long...

This paper studies self-control in a nationally representative sample. Using the well-established Tangney scale to measure trait self-control, we find that people’s age as well as the political and economic institutions they are exposed to have an economically meaningful impact on their level...