The heterogeneity of beauty premium in China: Evidence from CFPS

The college admissions contribution to the labor market beauty premium

“…This college admissions contribution may help explain the surprisingly greater labor market beauty premium for men in the US, and why it does not vary across jobs according to exposure to customers. Our evidence suggests that the labor market beauty premium for men and women in China (Deng et al, 2019;Gu & Ji, 2019;Hamermesh et al, 2002;Ling et al, 2019;Maurer-Fazio & Lei, 2015;Peng et al, 2019) and women and non-Whites of both genders in the US may arise after college. Our results, additionally, suggest the potential importance of controlling not only for the years of education in future studies of the labor market beauty premium but also for the rank of the college attended, particularly for men in the US.…”

“…A significant beauty premium across many occupations was observed in China (Gu & Ji, 2019; Li et al., 2020; Peng et al., 2019), including in areas such as software engineering, which has minimal customer contact (Maurer‐Fazio & Lei, 2015). A correspondence study in Israel using resumes with randomized photos of applicants with varying levels of beauty shows that only better‐looking men were more likely to receive a callback to a job application, whereas women suffered a beauty penalty in terms of callback rates, and even in jobs which, as the authors point out, beauty plays no obvious role: accounts management, budgeting, industrial engineering, and computer programming (Ruffle & Shtudiner, 2015).…”

Physical attractiveness and women’s intra-household bargaining power

“…For example, Wong and Penner (2016) used the US data to study the relationship between physical attractiveness and income, and found that the income gap between attractive individuals and average ones is even as high as 20%. Meanwhile, many Chinese scholars have studied the impact of beauty on personal income, and found that there are also obvious phenomena of beauty premium and ugliness penalty in China’s labor market ( Gu and Ji, 2019 ; Peng et al, 2020 ). For example, Peng et al (2020) showed that good-looking individuals earn roughly 5.4% more than the rest, and bad-looking individuals earn roughly 3.3% less than the rest.…”

“…Meanwhile, many Chinese scholars have studied the impact of beauty on personal income, and found that there are also obvious phenomena of beauty premium and ugliness penalty in China’s labor market ( Gu and Ji, 2019 ; Peng et al, 2020 ). For example, Peng et al (2020) showed that good-looking individuals earn roughly 5.4% more than the rest, and bad-looking individuals earn roughly 3.3% less than the rest. On the other hand, research shows that the quantity of resources such as income and assets will greatly influence individual’s bargaining power in the family decision-making process ( Mabsout and van Staveren, 2010 ; Martínez, 2013 ).…”

“…Considering that physically attractive individuals enjoy advantages in terms of intelligence, confidence, and popularity ( Grammer et al, 2003 ; Lai et al, 2013 ), many researchers claim that there is a beauty premium, namely, physical attractiveness pays off in economic and political affairs ( Mobius and Rosenblat, 2006 ; Jin et al, 2017 ; Póvoa et al, 2020 ). Attractive people achieve better outcomes than their less attractive counterparts, whether in economic cooperation or political elections ( Andreoni and Petrie, 2008 ; Peng et al, 2020 ). There have been a series of studies on the “beauty premium,” such as beauty and employment ( Deng et al, 2020 ), beauty and entrepreneurship ( Baron, 2000 ), and beauty and happiness ( Datta Gupta et al, 2016 ).…”