Personality Traits Across the Life Cycle: Disentangling Age, Period and Cohort Effects*

Abstract

Economists increasingly recognise the importance of personality traits for socio-economic outcomes, but little is known about the stability of these traits over the life cycle. Existing empirical contributions typically focus on age patterns and disregard cohort and period influences. This paper contributes novel evidence for the separability of age, period, and cohort effects for a broad range of personality traits based on systematic specification tests for disentangling age, period and cohort influences. Our estimates document that for different cohorts, the evolution of personality traits across the life cycle follows a stable, though non-constant, age profile, while there are sizeable differences across time periods.

Using within-person change in three large panel studies to estimate personality age trajectories.

“…The SOEP data can be accessed for scientific purposes and have been widely used (Goebel et al, 2019), including several studies on personality development across the life span (Donnellan & Lucas, 2008; Graham et al, 2020; Lucas & Donnellan, 2011; Specht et al, 2011; see also Fitzenberger et al, 2022). However, none of these studies have included the five waves of personality data that are available to date, and none of them have implemented FEM.…”

Have Preferences Become More Similar Worldwide?

“…Most of the literature in psychology and economics assumes either explicitly or implicitly that age and cohort patterns are distinct and separable. This assumption is supported by recent evidence that shows age profiles for risk preferences and various personality traits are stable across cohorts (Fitzenberger et al 2022). Moreover, previous work has examined the stability of preferences and found test-retest correlations similar to the levels of other personality traits (Frey et al 2017;Kosse et al 2020).…”

“…Methodologically, our analysis extends existing work on age and cohort patterns in preferences (Dohmen et al 2017;Fitzenberger et al 2022). By distinguishing between the moments of distributions of age-corrected and uncorrected preference measures, we disentangle cohort patterns in preference heterogeneity from country-specific heterogeneity in age profiles and thereby provide a new angle on the separability of age and cohort patterns.…”

Demographic and Political Transitions.

“…These socio-economic forces might be reinforced by psychological factors. For instance, Fitzenberger et al (2022) show that young people are less risk averse and more open to new experiences. Those personality traits make them more likely to participate in revolutionary actions (Nordås and Davenport, 2013;Weber, 2013Weber, , 2021.…”