Drivers of skill mismatch among Italian graduates: The role of personality traits

Abstract

It is now well accepted that human capital is a heterogeneous aggregate and that non-cognitive skills are at least as relevant as cognitive abilities. In spite of this growing interest in the labour market consequences of personality traits, the relationship between these and educational and skill mismatch is scant. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the five main personality traits (Big 5) on educational and skill mismatch in Italian graduates. To this aim, we use the 2018 wave of the Inapp-PLUS survey, which contains information on skill mismatch, on the Big 5 personality traits, and on a large number of other individual and job-specific characteristics.