How important is your personality? Labor market returns to personality for women in the US and UK

Why do apparently similar people have varied success in the labor market? While cognitive performance and educational attainment have been shown to be strong indicators of economic success, there remains a large portion of unexplained variance in earnings after controlling for the standard variables. This paper uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women and women from the National Child Development Study to explore the value of incorporating psychological traits into wage determination models. This research finds that traits such as locus of control, aggression, and withdrawal are all statistically significant factors in the wage determination models of white women.