joint seminar of HSE Research Seminar on Political Economy

Speaker:  Jan Fidrmuc (Department of Economics and Finance and CEDI, Brunel University)

Topic: "Beautiful Minds: Physical Attractiveness and Research Productivity in Economics"

joint work with Boontarika Paphawasit (College of Arts, Media and Technology, Chiang Mai University, Thailand)

Abstract: 

We study the impact of physical attractiveness of on productivity. Previous literature found a strong impact on wages and career progression, which can be either due to discrimination in favor of good-looking people or can reflect an association between attractiveness and productivity. We utilize a context where there is no or limited face-to-face interaction, academic publishing, so that scope for beauty-based discrimination should be limited. Using data on around 2,000 authors of journal publications in economics, we find a significantly positive effect of authors’ attractiveness on both journal quality and citations. However, the impact on citations disappears after we control for journal quality. 

Address: The HSE building at Shabolovka (ul. Shabolovka 26-4, room 4322).
If you don't have a HSE picture ID, please contact political.economy.hse@gmail.com to order a pass for the seminar before 12:00, Thursday, July 19.
See the web-page of the seminar http://economics.hse.ru/en/demat/politeconeng