The relevance of personality traits for urban economic growth: making space for psychological factors
研究了英国63个城市1981-2011年数据，发现神经质和创业文化等人格特质能额外解释城市经济增长差异，超越传统经济地理因素。
Economic growth differences across regions and cities can only be partly explained by standard explanations in economic geography. One reason for this might be the neglect of the psychological make-up of cities and its citizens. To assess the value added of incorporating psychological factors alongside the more standard explanations, this paper tests the relevance of personality traits for economic growth for a sample of UK cities. We argue that Neuroticism and Conscientiousness, and the traits that make up entrepreneurship culture help to explain urban growth differences. The personality scores of >400,000 UK residents are combined with economic data for 63 UK cities from 1981 to 2011. We find that both Neuroticism and entrepreneurship culture matter for economic growth. Our main contribution is that geographically clustered personality traits help to understand economic growth differences, and add explanatory power over and above standard determinants, also when the recursive relationship between personality traits and economic growth is taken into account.