20.04.2020Marco Pereira wins «UZH-2019 Fall Semester Prize» for his bachelor thesis

Marco Henriques Pereira, a student research assistant at the chair of Prof. Backes-Gellner, is one of the winners of the «UZH-2019 Fall Semester Prize». Congratulations! The prize is awarded for his bachelor thesis on «Personality requirements of jobs: An econometric analysis of job advertisements».

In his study, Pereira investigates for the first time the connection between personality requirements of occupations and labor market trends as measurable in job advertisements from the Swiss Job Market Monitor. To measure personality requirements at detailed occupational levels, he develops an interdisciplinary text analysis approach for the job advertisements. For so doing, he combines concepts from psychology, economics and computational linguistics. He links this data to a second data set (the Swiss Household Panel that contains individual worker data) to investigate the relationship between personality requirements of jobs for different occupations and the actual personality of individuals that work in these occupations. The results of his work show that the personality traits conscientiousness (e.g., being organized) and agreeableness (e.g., being a teamplayer) are not only increasing in demand in many occupations but are also increasingly found among the individuals that actually work in these occupations.