Abstract
Decades of research into the gender wage gap have revealed that human capital variables play a significant role in decreasing the portion of the gap that would otherwise be attributed to discrimination. Despite these advances, there remains an unexplained portion of the wage gap that is traditionally attributed to discrimination or omitted variable bias. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (U.S.), the Dutch Household Survey (The Netherlands), the British Household Panel Survey (U.K.), and the German Socioeconomic Panel Survey (Germany), I use ordinary least squares regression (OLS) and the Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition Method to estimate the contribution of personality traits in determining wages and in explaining the wage gap. Personality traits are defined by the commonly-used Five Factor Model of Personality, also known as the Big Five. These traits include: agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion, and openness. The analysis in this thesis finds that three of the four countries provide evidence for at least two of the personality traits being significant contributors to reducing the wage gap. Agreeableness and emotional stability provide the most robust findings across three of the four countries and explain between 2% to 13% of the wage gaps ceteris paribus.