Our study contributes in several ways to the economic literature. While economists have been increasingly interested in the determinants of people’s well-being (see Frey 2008 and Frey and Stutzer 2002 for surveys), sex has remained an under-researched topic in economics. A few economic studies have examined the link between sex and happiness (Blanchflower and Oswald 2004; Cheng and Smyth 2015; Loewenstein et al. 2015; Rainer and Smith 2012) or the determinants of infidelity (Adamopoulou 2013; Bishai and Grossbard 2010; Fair 1978; Potter 2011; Smith 2012). Those studies have not considered the role of personality traits.
On a broader scale, we also address a general research gap in family economics. Apart from some notable exceptions (Averett et al. 2020; Boxho et al. 2020; Dupuy and Galichon 2014; Flinn et al. 2018; Lundberg 2011, 2012), studies in family economics have paid little attention to the personality of partners as a determinant of the surplus of romantic relationships. This contrasts with studies in labor economics where a rapidly increasing body of research has examined the influence of personality traits on human capital formation and labor ; Borghans et al. 2008). This development in labor market research has been identified as �one of the most exciting developments in labor economics over the past : p. 1). Our study suggests that considering personality traits ily economics.
The link between personality and sex is a topic typically examined by psychologists (Allen 2019; Allen and Walter 2018). Against this background, our study follows a trend in economics to expand its scope of inquiry to topics traditionally addressed by other scientific disciplines. Of course, expanding the boundaries of economics into other social sciences by using larger and representative datasets or examining explanatory variables with greater statistical sophistication would be of limited value if it does not yield additional theoretical insights. A successful expansion of the scope of inquiry into nontraditional topics requires incorporating the new topics into economic thinking (Lazear 2000). Thus, to guide our empirical analysis, we provide an informal theoretical background discussion that integrates the psychological topic into the analytical framework of economics and, particularly, relates the topic to family economics.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides the theoretical background discussion. Section 3 describes the data and variables. Section 4 presents the empirical results. Section 5 discusses the results in light of our theoretical considerations. Section 6 concludes.
Background discussion
In what follows, we set the stage by providing a brief introduction to the Big Five model. We proceed with a theoretical discussion on the transmission channels through which the Big Five personality traits can influence sexuality. Developing an economics-based approach, we first describe general transmission channels and then relate the Big Five personality traits to these channels.
The Big Five personality traits
Psychologists view personality as enduring patterns of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors (Roberts 2009). Personality reflects the tendency of a person to respond in certain ways under certain circumstances. The most widely shared taxonomy of personality traits in psychology is the Big Five model (John et al. 2008; McCrae and Costa 2008). The Big Five model originated in Allport and Odbert’s (1936) lexical approach positing that individual differences in personality are encoded in language. Analyzing personality-describing words, psychologists concluded that personality traits can be organized into five dimensions. Since Goldberg (1981), the five dimensions of personality have been known as the Big Five. The Big Five personality traits are extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These personality traits have high predictive http://besthookupwebsites.org/tr/willow-inceleme power for a series of important life outcomes such as educational achievement, job performance, health, mortality, criminality, and divorce (Almlund et al. 2011; Borghans et al. 2008; Roberts et al. 2007).