NY Fed, Report: Noncognitive Skills at the Time of COVID-19, An Experiment with Professional Traders and Students

“We have studied whether the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted noncognitive skills in a sample of professional traders and, for comparison purposes, in a sample of students. We have found a significant effect of the pandemic on professional traders’ Agreeableness and Locus of Control (and, to a lower extent, Grit), and on students’ Conscientiousness. Overall, our findings cast doubt on the stability of noncognitive skills, particularly among professional trader, which is often taken as given in the literature. Given the existing empirical relationship between noncognitive skills and individuals’ financial decision making, the changes in noncognitive skills documented in this paper may have non-trivial consequences for economic outcomes, especially if they are permanent. Further data collected after the pandemic will help to shed light on the extent to which the changes in noncognitive skills observed at the onset of the pandemic are long-lasting; we leave the investigation of this issue for future research.”