Recently, an article titled “The Effects of Personality Traits on Wage: Empirical analyses based on China Employer-Employee Survey(CEES)”, written by Cheng Hong and Li Tang, has been published in Economic Research Journal (Issue 2, 2017), the most influential and professional economic journal in China. This is another important research paper based on the CEES data after the publications in Journal of International Trade and Journal of Beijing Normal University.
Besides human capital, industrial structure, demographic dividend and other traditional factors, the paper creatively introduces workers' personality traits as a unique perspective and theoretically discusses the effects of personality traits on wages. Based on the causal inference, an empirical analysis was made on the effects of personality traits on wages, which is of practical significance to research on changes in wages of China's workers.
China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) provides essential support for this study with empirical data. Through field surveys into enterprises during 2015 and 2016 for two consecutive years, based on the standard paradigm of internationally accepted Big Five Inventory (BFI) scale, effective CEES data were collected from more than 1,000 enterprises and nearly 10,000 employees including spirit of adventure, risk preference and conscientiousness, openness, extraversion, obedience and other personality traits, which provide unique empirical samples for the study on the effects of personality traits on wages.
Based on CEES, it was found that positive personality traits including openness and conscientiousness significantly promoted wages. Nowadays, China is in short of creative personality traits represented by openness, whose marginal contribution is more significant in wage income. Based on this founding, the recognition strategy of treatment effects is adopted for an empirical test on the causal effect of personality traits on workers' wages in the example of openness.
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