Fathering Daughters and Personality

Max van Lent ()
Additional contact information
Max van Lent: Leiden University

No 15012, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The big five personality traits develop over a person's lifetime. There is some suggestive evidence that major life events - such as getting married, being fired from a job, and having children - affect personality. However, these associations cannot be interpreted as causal. This is the first paper that studies the causal effect of a life event - the gender of the first-born child - on the big five personality trait scores of fathers. Using yearly longitudinal data (2008 - 2020) I find that having a first-born daughter instead of son increases fathers' extraversion. The gender of the first child also affects labor market outcomes for fathers. Fathers of first-born daughters earn 127 euro more per month (i.e. 6.9% of the average monthly wage). This effect is not driven by changes in the number of hours worked or job switches.

Keywords: family structure; fertility; life events; human capital; big five personality traits; labor market outcomes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J13 J16 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2022-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15012.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15012

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().