Beauty and the beast in the labor market: Evidence from a distribution regression approach

Karina Doorley and Eva Sierminska

No 2011-62, LISER Working Paper Series from Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)

Abstract: We apply an innovative technique to allow for differential effects of physical appearance across the wage distribution, as traditional methods confound opposing effects. Counterfactual wage distributions constructed using distribution regression,show that unattractive women are more likely to earn less than the median wage, particularly in professions where physical appearance is important. We also find a premium for well-paid attractive men in these professions. A comparison with results from traditional models shows that the characteristics of people in different physical appearance classes contributes to the effects identified using the latter and only a small portion could be discrimination.

Keywords: Wages; Distribution; Physical Appearance; Discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 J24 J30 J70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2011-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.liser.lu/publi_viewer.cfm?tmp=2729 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:irs:cepswp:2011-62

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LISER Working Paper Series from Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) 11, Porte des Sciences, L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette, G.-D. Luxembourg. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Library and Documentation ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).