Beauty and Professional Success: A Meta-Analysis

Kseniya Bortnikova, Tomas Havranek and Zuzana Irsova

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: Common wisdom suggests that beauty helps in the labor market. We show that two factors combine to explain away the mean beauty premium reported in the literature. First, correcting for publication bias reduces the premium by at least a third. Second, controlling for cognitive ability negates the premium for all occupations except sex workers, a point further underscored by the similarity of the beauty effect on earnings and productivity. The second factor implies a positive link, perhaps genetic, between beauty and intelligence. We find little evidence of substantial attenuation bias that could offset publication and omitted-variable biases. The empirical literature is inconsistent with discrimination based solely on tastes for beauty. To obtain these results we collect 1,159 estimates of the effect of beauty on earnings or productivity reported in 67 studies and codify 33 aspects that reflect estimation context, including the potential intensity of attenuation bias. We employ recently developed techniques to account for publication bias and model uncertainty.

Keywords: Beauty premium; productivity; meta-analysis; model uncertainty; publication bias; p-hacking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C83 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/289435/1/B ... essional-success.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Beauty and Professional Success: A Meta-Analysis (2024)
Working Paper: Beauty and Professional Success: A Meta-Analysis (2024)
Working Paper: Beauty and Professional Success: A Meta-Analysis (2024)
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:zbw:esprep:289435

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().