Publications

with Esteban García Miralles
Journal of Human Resources, forthcoming

Abstract:  Child skills are shaped by parental investments. Health shocks to parents can affect these investments and their children's skills. This paper estimates causal effects of severe parental health shocks on child socio-emotional skills. Drawing on a large-scale survey linked to hospital records, we find that socio-emotional skills of 11-16 year-olds are robust to these shocks, except for small reductions in Conscientiousness. We estimate short-run effects with child-fixed effects and dynamics around shocks with event studies. In the long-run, we find some evidence of build-up of effects that may be rationalized with shocks having a delayed impact on children's skills.

preprint, CEBI WP 21-20 , Cesifo WP 9880

with Mette Gørtz and Stefanie Schurer.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2021
Open-access preprint

Abstract:  We document gender and socioeconomic inequalities in personality over the life cycle (age 18–75), using the Big Five 2 (BFI-2) inventory linked to administrative data on a large Danish population. We estimate life-cycle profiles non-parametrically and adjust for cohort and sample-selection effects. We find that: (1) Women of all ages score more highly than men on all personality traits, including three that are positively associated with wages; (2) High-education groups score more favorably on Openness to Experience, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism than low-education groups, while there is no socioeconomic inequality by Conscientiousness; (3) Over the life cycle, gender and socioeconomic gaps remain constant, with two exceptions: the gender and SES gaps in Openness to Experience widen, while gender differences in Neuroticism, a trait associated with worse outcomes, diminish with age. We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of gender wage gaps, household production models, and optimal taxation.

IZA Discussion Paper 13378; CEBI Working Paper 16/20

first author with Steven G. Ludeke and Sarah Y. Junge, Robert M. Kirkpatrick, Oliver P. John, and Simon Calmar Andersen
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, April 2021

Abstract: Children’s educational outcomes are strongly correlated with their parents’ educational attainment. This finding is often attributed to the family environment—assuming, for instance, that parents’ behavior and resources affect their children’s educational outcomes. However, such inferences of a causal role of the family environment depend on the largely untested assumption that such relationships do not simply reflect genes shared between parent and child. We examine this assumption with an adoptee design in full-population cohorts from Danish administrative data. We test whether parental education predicts children’s educational outcomes in both biological and adopted children, looking at four components of the child’s educational development: (I) the child’s conscientiousness during compulsory schooling, (II) academic performance in those same years, (III) enrollment in academically challenging high schools, and (IV) graduation success. Parental education was a substantial predictor of each of these child outcomes in the full population. However, little intergenerational correlation in education was observed in the absence of genetic similarity between parent and child—that is, among adoptees. Further analysis showed that what links adoptive parents’ education did have with later-occurring components such as educational attainment (IV) and enrollment (III) appeared to be largely attributable to effects identifiable earlier in development, namely early academic performance (II). The primary nongenetic mechanisms by which education is transmitted across generations may thus have their effects on children early in their educational development, even as the consequences of those early effects persist throughout the child’s educational development.

Link to open-access preprint version and Supplementary Materials.


with Rasmus Landersø, Dorthe Bleses, Anders Højen, Philip Dale, Laura Justice
Rockwool Foundation Research Unit, Study Paper 155 (submitted)

with Steven G. Ludeke, Joe Vitriol, and Erik Gahner Larsen
Personality and Individual Differences (accepted 2021)
Open-access preprint

Abstract: To limit the transmission of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), it is important to understand the sources of social behavior for members of the general public. However, there is limited research on how basic psychological dispositions interact with social contexts to shape behaviors that help mitigate contagion risk, such as social distancing. Using a sample of 89,305 individuals from 39 countries, we show that Big Five personality traits and the  social context jointly shape citizens’ social distancing during the  pandemic. Specifically, we observed that the association between personality traits and social distancing behaviors were attenuated as the perceived societal consensus for social distancing increased. This held even after controlling for objective features of the environment such as the level of government restrictions in place, demonstrating the importance of subjective perceptions of local norms.


first author with Steven G. Ludeke, Oliver P. John, Simon C. Andersen
Journal of Research in Personality, Vol 92, June 2021

Abstract: Research on students’ understandings of their academic performance often faces limits with respect to sample diversity, statistical power, breadth of participant information, and ability to continuously track the development of participants. Government registry data do not face such limitations. We validate a brief measure of academic self-perceptions contained within the Danish Well-Being Survey, a self- report measure administered annually to all Danish public-school students (grades 4 through 9) and linked with rich registry data regarding these students, their families, schools, and communities. We then perform exceptionally well-powered analyses of the influence of academic self-perceptions on the pursuit of further academically-intensive education (N = 35,227) and of the development of academic self-perceptions during late childhood and adolescence (N = 284,024).

with Simon C. Andersen, Steven G. Ludeke, and Oliver P. John.
Journal of Personality, Vol. 88, issue 5, 2020
Open-access preprint

Abstract: Objective: Many studies have demonstrated that personality traits predict academic performance for students in high school and college. Much less evidence exists on whether the relationship between personality traits and academic performance changes from childhood to adolescence, and existing studies show very mixed findings. This study tests one hypothesis—that the importance of Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, and Conscientiousness for academic performance changes fundamentally during school—against an alternative hypothesis suggesting that the changing relationships found in previous research are largely measurement artifacts. Method: We used a nationwide sample of 135,389 primary and lower secondary students from Grade 4 to Grade 8. We replicated all results in a separate sample of another 127,375 students. Results: We found that academic performance was equally strongly related to our measure of Conscientiousness at all these grade levels, and the significance of Agreeableness and Emotional Stability predominantly reflected their connections with Conscientiousness. However, age also appeared to shape the relationship between Emotional Stability and performance. Conclusion: Amidst the replication crisis in psychology these findings demonstrate a very stable and predictable relationship between personality traits and academic performance, which may have important implications for the education of children already in primary school.

with Torben Heien Nielsen, Nete Munk Nielsen, Maya Rossin-Slater, and Miriam Wüst
Journal of Health Economics, Volume 66, July 2019

Abstract: This paper examines the long-term effects of childhood disability on individuals’ educational and occupational choices, late-career labor market participation, and mortality. We merge medical records on children hospitalized with poliomyelitis during the 1952 Danish epidemic to census and administrative data, and exploit quasi-random variation in paralysis incidence in this population. While childhood disability increases the likelihood of early retirement and disability pension receipt at age 50, paralytic polio survivors are more likely to obtain a university degree and to go on to work in white-collar and computer-demanding jobs than their non-paralytic counterparts. Our results are consistent with individuals making educational and occupational choices that reflect a shift in the comparative advantage of cognitive versus physical skills. We also find that paralytic polio patients from low socioeconomic status backgrounds are more likely to die prematurely than their non-paralytic counterparts, whereas there is no effect on mortality among polio survivors from more advantaged backgrounds. 

NBER Working Paper 24753


Labour Economics, April 2018

Abstract: This paper estimates the effects of personality traits and IQ on lifetime earnings of the men and women of the Terman study, a high-IQ U.S. sample. Age-by-age earnings profiles allow a study of when personality traits affect earnings most, and for whom the effects are strongest. I document a concave life-cycle pattern in the payoffs to personality traits, with the largest effects between the ages of 40 and 60. An interaction of traits with education reveals that personality matters most for highly educated men. The largest effects are found for Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness (negative), where Conscientiousness operates partly through education, which also has significant returns.

Open-access preprint, Link to IZA Discussion Paper 8235;   Web Appendix.

Article in Harvard Business Review (hbr.org)

Working Papers

with Mikkel Aagaard Houmark, Cecilie Marie Løchte Jørgensen, and Ida Lykke Kristiansen

IZA DP 15421 , HCEO WP 2022-023 (submitted)

with Mette Gørtz
IZA DP 16300, CEBI WP 04/23 (revise and resubmit)

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 scales, in contrast, have a much smaller and mostly insignificant contribution to the gradient. We decompose the gradient into its components with an order-invariant method, and use sibling-fixed effects to address that much of the observed education-health gradient reflects associations rather than causal relationships. There are education-health gradients even within sibling pairs; personality facets reduce these gradients by 30% or more. Our analyses use an extraordinarily large survey (N=28,261) linked to high-quality administrative registers with information on SES background and objective health outcomes. 

with Rasmus Landersø, Dorthe Bleses, Phillip Dale, Anders Højen and Laura Justice 

RF Study Paper 155 (revise and resubmit)

Joint Choice of Education and Occupation: The Role of Parental Occupation

with Remi Piatek

Testing older sibling effects on language development with massive registry data: Replication and extension of Havron et al. (2019)

first author with Steven G. Ludeke, Simon Calmar Andersen (submitted)