Last year, I wrote a post about the wage premium that blondes receive in the labour market. That post was based on this 2012 article by Nicolas Guéguen. It turns out that there is more evidence of the blond wage premium. I recently read this 2010 article by David Johnston (Queensland University of Technology), published in the journal Economics Letters (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online). Whereas Guéguen used data from a field experiment, Johnston relied on panel data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 cohort. Based on a sample of over 20,000 observations, Johnston finds that:
...blonde women earn 7% more than brunette women (the omitted hair colour category).
Interestingly, there are no statistically significant difference in wages between brunettes and women with other hair colours (light brown, black, or red). Also interesting, but not commented on by Johnston, is that green-eyed women earn nearly seven percent more than brown-eyed women (and there is no statistically significant difference in wages between women with blue or hazel eyes, and women with brown eyes). Also interesting is that, when looking at women's spouses:
Spouses of blonde women are estimated to earn around 6% more than the spouses of other women.
That probably reflects assortative matching in the marriage market (more-educated people tend to marry other people with high education). The effect of green eyes is not statistically significant for spousal wages.
Of course, the NLSY data are observational (and self-reported), so any results are correlations rather than causal. Since hair colour is a modifiable characteristic, it could be that women with higher wages are more likely to dye their hair blond (or women with lower wages are more likely to dye their hair darker colours). Or any number of other possibilities. And, Johnston's analysis is limited to "Caucasian women" - this is a point I will return to on my next post on the beauty premium.
As I've noted before (see links below), the beauty premium is a labour market phenomenon for which there is a large (and growing) amount of evidence. Physical features do appear to be correlated with earnings. Blondes do appear to have more fun.
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