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    Personality and wealth accumulation among older couples: Do dispositional characteristics pay dividends?


    Mosca, Irene and McCrory, Cathal (2016) Personality and wealth accumulation among older couples: Do dispositional characteristics pay dividends? Journal of Economic Psychology, 56. pp. 1-19.

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    Abstract

    This paper explores whether the ‘Big 5’ personality characteristics: Emotional Stability, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness to Experience, contribute to net household wealth accumulation among 1172 couple pairs (n = 2344) participating in The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, independent of other socio-demographic and human capital variables. We employ quantile regression to determine whether the effects of personality vary at different levels of the conditional distribution of wealth. Results reveal that the personality characteristics of the financial respondent to the survey are more strongly associated with wealth than those of the non-financial respondent. Specifically, we find that emotional stability and extraversion are positively associated with wealth at the household level among spousal pairs. We also find that conscientiousness is positively associated with wealth, but the relationship is only significant at the lower end of the wealth continuum. In general, agreeableness and openness are negatively associated with wealth although the relationships are non-significant. These findings indicate that personality is an important factor shaping individuals’ consumption preferences and financial decision-making behaviour over the life-course.

    Item Type: Article
    Keywords: Personality traits; Big five; Non-cognitive traits; Wealth accumulation; Cohort study; Household Saving, Personal Finance;Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions;
    Academic Unit: Faculty of Social Sciences > Economics, Finance and Accounting
    Item ID: 11388
    Depositing User: Irene Mosca
    Date Deposited: 21 Oct 2019 15:42
    Journal or Publication Title: Journal of Economic Psychology
    Refereed: Yes
    URI:
    Use Licence: This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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