Skills, expectations, and personality traits as determinants of academic achievement
Final Report Abstract
Behavioral traits and economic preferences matter for education, labor market, and life outcomes. Given the relevance of personality in education and the labor market, a key question is where differences across fields and occupations emerge from. One the one hand, there is increasing evidence of sorting on cognitive and especially non-cognitive skills in the labor market. On the other hand, it might be that traits are malleable, such that differences in traits across occupation could be due to exposure to different environments. However, in most papers on personality and education and labor market outcomes, it is not entirely clear whether differences in preferences and traits are an outcome of selection, of labor demand for specific non-cognitive skills, or of the environment in which workers and students are acting. Moreover, the available evidence on sorting often comes from rather specific occupations or studies specific (subsets of) traits, raising questions about the generalizability of the findings. In this project, we study sorting into field of study vs. the malleability of personality and preferences conditional on sorting leveraging a unique combination of survey and administrative education data from several cohorts of students from one large university in Germany. The setting allows us to investigate sorting on economic preferences and personality traits, the relation between preferences, traits, and education outcomes, and the malleability of students’ preferences and traits at university. Our key findings are as follows: First, initial sorting is key to understand differences in personality across study fields. Second, malleability of preferences and traits at university is modest. Third, traits and preferences matter differentially across fields in predicting academic achievement.
