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http://hdl.handle.net/10419/51918
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| Title: | | "Beauty is the promise of happiness"?  |
| Authors: | | Hamermesh, Daniel S. Abrevaya, Jason |
| Issue Date: | | 2011 |
| Series/Report no.: | | Discussion paper series // Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit 5600 |
| 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. |
| Subjects: | | life satisfaction measurement error looks |
| JEL: | | I30 J10 C20 |
| Persistent Identifier of the first edition: | | urn:nbn:de:101:1-201104134243 |
| Document Type: | | Working Paper |
| Appears in Collections: | | IZA Discussion Papers, Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (IZA)
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