I've written a number of times about the beauty premium in the labour market (see here and here, as well as here for my review of Daniel Hamermesh's excellent book Beauty Pays). More attractive people earn more. Hamermesh notes a number of potential mechanisms that might underlie the beauty premium.
However, in an interesting twist, a 2019 article by Hugo Mialon of Emory University (whose previous work includes the economics of faking orgasms) and Erik Nesson (Ball State University) looks at whether there is a premium associated with having acne in high school. They use data from over 43,000 adolescents in the Add Health survey, and find that:
...having acne in high school is positively associated with overall grade point average (GPA), mathematics GPA, and science GPA in high school; positively associated with earning an A in high school math, science, history/social studies, and English; and positively associated with completing a bachelor’s degree. The associations are generally stronger for women than for men... We also find some weak evidence that acne is associated with higher future personal labor market earnings for women.
Mialon and Nesson try to argue that acne is exogenous, meaning not related to any variable that in turn is related to student academic outcomes or later earnings. They show that having acne is:
...not related to measures of socioeconomic status, including parental education levels or most measures of family structure.
I don't find those particular results convincing. Parental education is likely to be measured with error (particularly since the data are drawn from the adolescents, not from the parents), and Mialon and Nesson include "don't know" and "missing" as categories in their education variable, which isn't a particularly robust way of handling it. So, I don't think we can interpret these results as necessarily causal, even though Mialon and Nesson provide some evidence of a plausible mechanism:
In theory, having acne may reduce feelings of being socially accepted, thereby reducing time spent socializing and increasing time spent studying, which may be conducive to educational attainment.We find strong evidence that having acne is associated with feeling less socially accepted and less attractive. Interestingly, we also find that acne is associated with reduced participation in sports clubs and increased participation in nonsports clubs, suggesting a possible shift from physical to intellectual pursuits.
Perhaps that explanation is true. Or perhaps adolescents whose parents had acne, and whose parents also achieved better in school, spend more time on academic pursuits. Is the causality occurring in this generation, or the previous generation? Or the one before that? It's an interesting question, but this should be far from the last word on this topic.
[HT: Marginal Revolution, last year]
Read more:
- Blonds have more fun (or rather, they get paid more)
- The beauty premium in undergraduate study is small, and more attractive women major in economics
- The beauty premium in the LPGA
- The beauty and height premiums in the labour market
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