Career choice, wage distributions and personality: analysing how young people’s decisions to enter certain careers are driven by the shapes of the income distributions in those careers

Previous studies have found evidence from a variety of settings suggesting that people are attracted to highly-skewed income distributions, that is, income distributions in which there is a very small chance of earning a great deal. This seems to explain why people are attracted to long-shot gambles at the racetrack or in lotteries, as well as to careers where a few "superstars" earn most of the available income. There is some evidence that this behaviour is more pronounced among men than among women, but no explanation why. This project would merge an ESRC longitudinal dataset, Understanding Society, with occupation-level data from the Labour Force Survey to analyse how young people’s decisions to enter certain careers are driven by the shapes of the income distributions in those careers. The rich information on cognitive and non-cognitive skills in Understanding Society would then be used to examine what behavioural factors motivate a person to enter an occupation with a highly-skewed income distribution.