Personaluty and income: an empirical study

In this research we take a look at the effect of personality on earnings of a person. The Big Five personality traits are used; they are measured by making use of the international personality item pool. These questions and traits have been proven to be a sufficient estimation for personality. We find that agreeableness and neuroticism have a negative effect on the earnings of a person. We also find that conscientiousness and openness have a positive influence on the earnings of a person. Extraversion shows no real relation. Overall we can conclude that personality has an influence on the earnings of a person. The same results are found for men and women, there does not seem to be a difference between genders. The same holds for the different origins, Dutch, western foreigner and non-western foreigners. All the different origins show the same relation as the main findings. Besides that it is shown that openness has the biggest positive impact on income, the biggest negative impact is divided between agreeableness and neuroticism.