Personality and Marital Surplus*

This paper uses data from the German Socio-economic Panel Study to examine the effect of psychological traits, in particular personality, on the formation and dissolution of marital and cohabiting relationships. Personality traits have substantial effects on propensities to marry and divorce. Changing patterns of selection into and out of domestic partnerships indicate that the determinants of marital surplus have changed between older cohorts who were born in the years after World War II and younger cohorts born in the 1960s. For younger cohorts, the effects of personality traits on the probability of marriage are identical for men and women, which is consistent with returns to marriage that are based on joint consumption. Tastes for marital public goods appear to be negatively related to openness to experience (a desire for change and variety) and positively related to conscientiousness for both men and women. Selection into marriage is associated with distinctly different personality profiles for older men and older women, suggesting that gender-specialized contributions to household public goods were an important source of marital surplus for these cohorts. Divorce is related, not just to low marital surplus, but also to low emotional stability and the availability of alternatives. Comments from participants in the “Household Economics” session at the 2008 European Society for Population Economics annual conference in London, the Gender Economics seminar at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the Population Association of American 2010 Meetings and seminars at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York University, CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Washington and Duke University, and from Katharina Spiess, Dick Startz, Simine Vazire and Bill Dickens are gratefully acknowledged. Financial support was provided by the Castor Professorship in Economics. An early version of this paper was completed while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. Kwok Ping Tsang and Seth Borgo have provided invaluable assistance.