Personality traits as an engine of knowledge: A quantile regression approach

We use a unique micro-level data set to investigate the impact of personality traits on education. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study shedding light on the contribution of each of the Big Five personality traits on the education decision made by the individuals. Our findings, uncover a significant effect of non-cognitive skills on the level of education. Specifically, we argue that the estimated signs of the non-cognitive skills remain stable across the quantiles. It is shown that people with high emotional stability invest in human capital. Lastly, our model survived robustness checks under the inclusion of two aggregated higher-order factors.