"Beauty Too Rich for Use": Billionaires' Assets and Attractiveness

Daniel Hamermesh and Andrew Leigh

No 14762, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We examine how the net worth of billionaires relates to their looks, as rated by 16 people of different gender and ethnicity. Surprisingly, their financial assets are unrelated to their beauty; nor are they related to their educational attainment. As a group, however, billionaires are both more educated and better-looking than average for their age. Men, people who reside in Western countries, and those who inherited substantial wealth, are wealthier than other billionaires. The results do not arise from measurement error or nonrandom sample selectivity. They are consistent with econometric theory about the impact of truncating a sample to include observations only from the extreme tail of the dependent variable. The point is underscored by comparing estimates of earnings equations using all employees in the 2018 American Community Survey to those using a sample of the top 0.1 percent. The findings suggest the powerful role of luck within the extremes of the distributions of economic outcomes.

Keywords: sample truncation; education; financial wealth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C24 J24 J40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2021-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Labour Economics, 2022, 73, 102153

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14762.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: “Beauty too rich for use”: Billionaires’ assets and attractiveness (2022)
Working Paper: "Beauty Too Rich for Use": Billionaires' Assets and Attractiveness (2021)
Working Paper: “Beauty Too Rich for Use”*: Billionaires’ Assets and Attractiveness (2021)
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:iza:izadps:dp14762

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().