Maintaining (Locus of) Control? Assessing the Impact of Locus of Control on Education Decisions and Wages

53 Pages Posted: 10 Jan 2011

See all articles by Remi Piatek

Remi Piatek

University of Chicago

Pia Pinger

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Multiple version iconThere are 3 versions of this paper

Date Written: November 23, 2010

Abstract

This paper establishes that individuals with an internal locus of control, i.e., who believe that reinforcement in life comes from their own actions instead of being determined by luck or destiny, earn higher wages. However, this positive effect only translates into labor income via the channel of education. Factor structure models are implemented on an augmented data set coming from two different samples. By so doing, we are able to correct for potential biases that arise due to reverse causality and spurious correlation, and to investigate the impact of premarket locus of control on later outcomes.

Keywords: locus of control, wages, latent factor model, data set combination

JEL Classification: C31, J24, J31

Suggested Citation

Piatek, Rémi and Pinger, Pia, Maintaining (Locus of) Control? Assessing the Impact of Locus of Control on Education Decisions and Wages (November 23, 2010). SOEPpaper No. 338, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1736548 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1736548

Rémi Piatek (Contact Author)

University of Chicago ( email )

1101 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
United States

Pia Pinger

affiliation not provided to SSRN ( email )