Children's Personality and Its Contribution to School Grades Inequality: Evidence From Mexico

Abstract

We explore the relationship between Big-5 Personality Traits and school grades, using a novel survey of state primary school children in Mexico. Linear school fixed-effects estimates controlling for household income, principal caregiver's education, IQ, and personality traits indicate that higher conscientiousness and agreeableness consistently and significantly correlate with high school performance in all subjects, net of child's IQ. A regression-based inequality decomposition shows that a child's personality accounts for 5.1% and 6.5% of the inequality in mathematics for girls and boys, whereas for Spanish, it accounts for 3.9% and 8.0%, respectively. Results are robust to unobservable confounders using Oster bounds.