Beauty and the Labor Market
Hamermesh and Biddle develop a theory of how workers sort into occupations by appearance and use it to test whether looks affect earnings, using three surveys that include interviewers' ratings of respondents' looks: the 1977 Quality of Employment survey, the 1971 Quality of American Life survey and the 1981 Canadian Quality of Life survey. With demographic and labour-market characteristics held constant, plain-looking people earn less than average-looking people, who earn less than good-looking people. The penalty for plainness is 5 to 10 per cent, slightly larger than the premium for beauty, and the effects are slightly larger for men than for women. Better-looking people sort into occupations where looks are likelier to be productive, but the effect of looks on earnings is mostly independent of occupation.
Hamermesh and Biddle develop a theory of how workers sort into occupations by appearance and use it to test whether looks affect earnings, using three surveys that include interviewers' ratings of respondents' looks: the 1977 Quality of Employment survey, the 1971 Quality of American Life survey and the 1981 Canadian Quality of Life survey. With demographic and labour-market characteristics held constant, plain-looking people earn less than average-looking people, who earn less than good-looking people. The penalty for plainness is 5 to 10 per cent, slightly larger than the premium for beauty, and the effects are slightly larger for men than for women. Better-looking people sort into occupations where looks are likelier to be productive, but the effect of looks on earnings is mostly independent of occupation.
Written from the abstract read 2026-10-27 on the NBER working paper page (w4518).
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Hamermesh, D. S., & Biddle, J. E. (1994). Beauty and the labor market. American Economic Review, 84(5), 1174-1194.