Nobel Beauty

Jan Fidrmuc, Boontarika Paphawasit (boontarika.p@cmu.ac.th) and Cigdem Tunali
Additional contact information
Boontarika Paphawasit: College of Arts, Media and Technology, Chiang Mai University, Thailand

Working Paper series from Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis

Abstract: We consider the effect of physical attractiveness, assessed using publicly available pictures of top scientists, on their probability of winning the Nobel Prize. There is now an extensive body of literature that finds that physically attractive people receive non-negligible benefits in the labor market, marriage market and social life. In contrast, we find that attractiveness is negatively correlated with the probability of being awarded the Nobel, with the magnitude of this effect being non-negligible. We discuss the potential mechanisms that could explain this result.

Keywords: Contests; prizes; productivity; discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J24 J70 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.rcea.org/RePEc/pdf/wp17-27.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rim:rimwps:17-27

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper series from Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marco Savioli (marco.savioli@unisalento.it).