Personality traits and social inequality

During many decades, sociologists have downplayed the role that personality traits play in shaping individual’s lives. However, recent studies, mostly in economics, have shown the influence of these traits on a several educational and occupational outcomes. This thesis is an attempt to shed more light on this topic. By using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, it first investigates how the Big Five personality traits affect two important labor market outcomes: unemployment incidence and job mobility. The results from these first two articles show two things. First, personality traits contribute importantly to processes of job mobility and job loss. Second, models including personality traits fit better compare to models that exclude them. Additionally, the inclusion of personality traits also improves our understanding of the underlying process in the labor market. The second part of this thesis focuses on how personality traits are transmitted from parents to their children. My results show that socialization processes are extremely important in the transmission and development of personality traits. Higher educated parents are more successful in promoting socially desirable and success-enhancing traits than lower educated ones. While there is a direct influence of the parent’s education on the development of children’s personality traits, the effect is mediated by different childrearing practices and by the use of external daycare