 "Beauty Is the Promise of Happiness"?Daniel Hamermesh and Jason Abrevaya No 5600, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Abstract: We measure the impact of individuals' looks on their life satisfaction or happiness. Using five data sets from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Germany, we construct beauty measures in different ways that allow putting a lower bound on the true effects of beauty on happiness. Personal beauty raises happiness, with a one standard-deviation change in beauty generating about 0.10 standard deviations of additional satisfaction/happiness among men, 0.12 among women. Accounting for a wide variety of covariates, including those that might be affected by differences in beauty, and particularly effects in the labor and marriage markets, the impact among men is more than halved, among women slightly less than halved. The majority of the effect of beauty on happiness may work through its effects on economic outcomes. Keywords: life satisfaction; measurement error; looks (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published - published in: European Economic Review, 2013, 64, 351-368 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5600 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC. |
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