Personality and Labour Market Income: Evidence from Longitudinal Data Jutta Viinikainen — Katja Kokko — Lea Pulkkinen — Jaakko Pehkonen Abstract. This study contributes to the literature on how personality is rewarded in the labour market by examining the relationship between personality and labour market income. Our results suggest that adulthood extraversion is positively associated with income when education, work experience, and unemployment history, measured prospectively from longitudinal data, are controlled for. In addition, childhood constructiveness indicating active and well-controlled behaviour has a positive association with income in adulthood. 1. Introduction The psychological literature suggests that personality traits, known as the Big Five factors of personality (neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experiences, conscientiousness, and agreeableness), have specific associations with different vocational interests. For example, extraversion correlates positively with entrepreneurial and social interests, openness with artistic and investigative interests, conscientiousness with conventional interests, and agree- ableness with social interests (see Tokar et al., 1998 for a review). Studies have also revealed associations between personality traits and various aspects of work-related performance, as reviewed by Burch and Anderson (2009). Conscientiousness has been shown to be associated with several work performance criteria, although there is recent evidence that the narrower subtraits of global conscientiousness, such as order and dependability, have specific associa- tions with performance (Dudley et al., 2006). Neuroticism has generally been found to be negatively associated with job performance and different dimensions of career success. Extra- version is most consistently related to leadership and is also associated with teamwork and career success. In addition, Seibert and Kraimer (2001) reported that extraversion is positively related to salary levels, promotion, and career satisfaction. There is also some evidence (Pulkkinen et al., 2006) that adaptive child and adolescent social behaviour, indicated by a combination of social activity and high self-control of behaviour, precedes a high level of adult achievement, including a high level of education, high occupational status, and stable employ- ment. Personality characteristics assessed as early as early school age might thus matter when it comes to success in working life and earnings. Jutta Viinikainen (author for correspondence) — Katja Kokko — Lea Pulkkinen — Jaakko Peh- konen, School of Business and Economics, Department of Psychology, P.O. Box 35, FI-40014 Univer- sity of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland. E-mail: jutta.viinikainen@jyu.fi. Katja Kokko was funded by grant No. 118316 and Lea Pulkkinen by grant No. 127125 awarded by the Academy of Finland. Jaakko Pehkonen and Jutta Viinikainen were funded by grants from the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation. We would like to thank anonymous referees for their helpful comments. LABOUR 24 (2) 201–220 (2010) JEL J24, J31, I20 © 2010 CEIS, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Rd., Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA.