Abstract
In modern societies, people are often classified as "White Collar" or "Blue Collar" workers. This classification informs us a great deal about the lives of individuals within these categories. This analysis examines the effect of an individual's psychometrically derived personality traits and status of their parents on the probability of attaining a white collar occupation over the baseline category of a blue collar occupation, controlling for human capital and other factors. The paper uses data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey to estimate a random effects probit model to capture the effects on the probability of being in a white collar occupation. The results are then examined using the average marginal effects of the different conditioning variables over the whole sample. The analysis confirms the previous findings of human capital theory, but finds that personality and parental status also have significant effects on occupational outcomes. The results suggest that the magnitude of the average marginal effect of parental status is small and the effect of the personality trait "conscientiousness" is large and rivals that of education. Finally, estimates of separate models for males and females indicate that effects differ between the genders for key variables, with personality traits in females having a relatively larger effect on their occupational outcomes due to the diminished effects of education.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 39th Australian Conference of Economists (ACE10), 27-29 September 2010, Sydney, Australia |
| Publisher | Economic Society of Australia |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Publication status | Published - 2010 |
| Event | Australian Conference of Economists - Duration: 8 Jul 2012 → … |
Conference
| Conference | Australian Conference of Economists |
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| Period | 8/07/12 → … |