Interesting article, especially since I always assumed that having an uncommon name is beneficial. I'm "morgante" virtually everywhere and people tend to remember my name pretty easily. There has to be some benefit to that.

On the other hand, it definitely seems like we could be looking at an instance of correlation. My educated, left-wing parents chose a fairly unusual name and that also reflects how they raise me. So it's hard to disassociate any of my name from my upbringing in deciding any impact on life outcomes. Probably the best studies in this are the ones comparing siblings, but even those are susceptible to third variables (perhaps second children are more likely to get a common name, and are certainly raised differently).