Significantly positive effect of authors’ attractiveness on research productivity measured by citations, journal ranking, & journal impact factor; attractiveness is important even in the absence of face-to-face interactions

Fidrmuc, Jan and Boontarika Paphawasit. “Beautiful Minds : Physical Attractiveness and Research Productivity in Economics.” (2018).https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Beautiful-Minds-%3A-Physical-Attractiveness-and-in-Fidrmuc-Paphawasit/37191c89e4cef72d32edf892b317258bee5412df

Abstract: This study examines 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 favour 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 2,800 authors who published their papers in 16 economics journals in 2012, we find a significantly positive effect of authors’ attractiveness on research productivity measured by citations, journal ranking, and journal impact factor. Other strong predictors of productivity are team size (positive effect on productivity) and work tenure (negative effect). These results are obtained with both OLS and quantile regression. Our results suggest that physical attractiveness has important benefits even in the absence of face-to-face interactions.