The effect of personality traits on subject choice and performance in high school: Evidence from an English cohort

We use matching methods to control for a rich set of adolescent and family characteristics and we find that personality traits do affect study choices and performance in test scores - particularly in Mathematics and Science. We explore the robustness of our results using the methodology proposed by Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005) that consists of making hypotheses about the correlation between the unobservables that determine test scores and subjects' choices and the unobservables that influence personality.