Research Papers

Personality and Wage Growth Over the Lifecycle (Job Market Paper) [working paper]

This paper examines how personality traits impact the wages of low-educated adult men throughout their working lives. The empirical findings reveal economically and statistically significant wage gaps associated with personality traits across the life cycle. For example, highly extraverted early-career workers earn, on average, 18 log points more than their highly introverted counterparts, while highly agreeable mid-career workers experience average wages 24 log points lower than highly disagreeable mid-career workers. Motivated by these empirical findings, I estimate a life cycle model that incorporates on-the-job search and bargaining, personality traits, and skill accumulation. The model explores the role of personality trait heterogeneity in generating observed wage gaps throughout the life cycle via the main model mechanisms. Firms differ in skill-match productivity levels, and skills accumulate on the job, whereas personality traits are fixed upon entry into the labour market. Personality traits influence the search and skill channels, impacting job offer probabilities, job separation probabilities, and the law of motion of skill. The results indicate that personality trait heterogeneity within the on-the-job search channel is most important in generating the observed wage gaps. Eliminating personality trait differences in all channels leads to a reduction in wage inequality over the first 15 years of workers' careers.

Conference Presentations: Annual Canadian Economic Association Conference (June 2024)

Post-School Skill Production: New Measures and Patterns from the Canadian Longitudinal International Study of Adults (LISA)  (with Audra Bowlus and Chris Robinson) [working paper]

This paper uses innovative measures to study the production of skills in the post schooling period. Relatively informal forms of skill acquisition play a major role indicating more formal training only captures a small fraction of total on-the-job training. New evidence on the determinants of offer and take-up rates for training show most workers are offered and take-up training with variation in hours of training. Using a self-reported skill growth measure, we find that workers taking employer provided training often report no change in skill suggesting that some training is unproductive, or of too short a duration. Training hours for this group are less than 2 weeks over a 2-year period whereas training for large skill increases, by contrast, is often 1-2 months or more. Finally, more hours of training are strongly associated with higher skill production for workers who report employer provided training as being important for skill growth.

New Evidence on Skill Growth and Wages from the Canadian Longitudinal International Study of Adults  (with Audra Bowlus and Chris Robinson) [working paper]

The Canadian Longitudinal International Study of Adults (LISA) provides a combination of a skill or ability test measure, an innovative measure of an individual’s overall skill growth, and measures of job tasks or skills observed at the level of the individual worker rather than inferred from the worker’s occupation. We exploit this unique combination of measures to examine human capital empirical specifications that extend beyond those typically used in the previous literature. We examine the contribution of the skill measures in LISA, to human capital explanations of both wage level and wage growth variation across individuals in the LISA panel. Relative to a standard human capital empirical specification that includes only education and job experience measures, the extended specifications result in substantial improvement in explanatory power for both log wage level and log wage growth equations.

Conference and Seminar Presentations: Canadian Research Data Centre Network (CRDCN) Conference (November 2023); Canadian Labour Economics Forum (CLEF) Webinar (December 2023); Bank of Canada (April 2024); Annual Canadian Economic Association Conference (June 2024)

Skill Changes, Skill-Increasing Activities, and Wage Growth [Slides]

This paper provides new and innovative ways of measuring skill accumulation, using data from the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA). The measures utilized in this paper indicate how an individual's skills have changed over time and what activity methods they used to accumulate more skills. The skill change measure exhibits the age and educational skill accumulation patterns that were previously theorized by Becker (1964) and Ben-Porath (1967). However, the paper also highlights the existence of a non-trivial proportion of workers who reported no skill growth over a two- or four-year period, despite coming from groups with high potential returns from skill investment. Additionally, the skill change measure captures significant variation in wage growth for early- and mid-career workers that traditional human capital indicators fail to capture. The data also indicates that workers leverage both formal and informal methods, with a particular emphasis on independent activities, to acquire new skills, providing valuable information on skill acquisition strategies potentially useful for policymakers. Overall, this paper provides a comprehensive examination of the evolution of workers' skills, the actions workers take to acquire more skills and the resulting effects on wage growth.

Conference Presentations: Annual Canadian Economics Association Conference (June 2021)