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Urban psychology and British cities: Do personality traits matter for resilience to recessions?
Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal,
13
(3),
290-307
(2020)
Abstract
There has been much recent interest in the ‘resilience’ of cities (and regions) to shocks of various kinds. Studies have found, for example, that cities (and regions) appear to have different degrees of resistance to and recoverability from economic shocks, such as major recessions.1–3 In this paper we explore whether and to what extent the clustered personality traits of a city’s population, as measured by the so-called ‘Big Five’ traits, might be relevant to explaining these differences. The paper utilises the personality scores of more than 400,000 UK residents across some 63 cities to examine how far variations in these scores help to account for differences in how those cities have reacted to major recessions. We find that for the three recessionary shocks in our sample period, the trait openness (to experience) has a strong significant relationship with city resilience. Cities with a higher degree of openness to experience turn out to be more resilient to UK-wide recessionary shocks. These results also hold when account is taken for the age and location of birth of a city’s residents. We also briefly discuss potential policy implications.
Keywords: UK cities; resilience; recessions; personality traits; Big Five; regions; psychology
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Harry Garretsen is Professor of International Economics and Business at the University of Groningen. He is also Director of In the LEAD, the research centre on leadership and performance issues at the University of Groningen. In his research the emphasis is on the relationship between international and regional economics and economic geography, as well as between leadership, context and economic performance. Harry has a PhD in economics and regularly acts as economic policy adviser.
Janka Stoker is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at the University of Groningen. She is also Director of In the LEAD, the research centre on leadership and performance issues at the University of Groningen. In her research, she focuses on leadership and diversity, top management teams, middle management and governance. Janka holds a PhD in psychology and in her work she has always combined academic research with the practice of both private and public organisations.
Dimitrios Soudis is a data scientist at the Center for Information Technology at the University of Groningen, specialising in econometric modelling and machine learning. Dimitrios completed his PhD on international political economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business in Groningen in 2014 and since then he has worked on and published research on the interface between economics, leadership and management, including on the relationship between regionally clustered personality traits and regional development.
Ron Martin is Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Cambridge and Fellow at St Catharine’s College. His main research interests include the geographies of labour markets, regional development and competitiveness, the geographies of money and finance, geographical economics and evolutionary economic geography. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, President of the Regional Studies Association and in 2016 was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Victoria Medal for ‘outstanding contributions to economic geography’.
Jason Rentfrow is Reader in personality and individual differences at the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge and Fellow at Fitzwilliam College. Jason’s research examines the links between basic psychological characteristics and common social psychological processes. In his work, he has, inter alia, examined how personality is expressed in and across geographic regions and how impressions of others are formed on the basis of such information.
