modeling beauty

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Jan 4 18:36:48 PST 2000


[The hits keep coming.]

"Dress For Success -- Does Primping Pay?"

BY: DANIEL S. HAMERMESH

University of Texas at Austin

Department of Economics

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

XIN MENG

Australian National University

JUNSEN ZHANG

Chinese University of Hong Kong

Department of Economics

Paper ID: NBER Working Paper No. 7167

Date: June 1999

Contact: DANIEL S. HAMERMESH

Email: Mailto:hamermes at eco.utexas.edu

Postal: University of Texas at Austin

Department of Economics

Austin, TX 78712 USA

Phone: (512)475-8526

Fax: (512)471-3510

Co-Auth: XIN MENG

Email: Mailto:xin.meng at anu.edu.au

Postal: Australian National University

Research School of Asian and Pacific Studies

Canberra, ACT 0200 AUSTRALIA

Co-Auth: JUNSEN ZHANG

Email: Mailto:b578736 at mailserv.cuhk.edu.hk

Postal: Chinese University of Hong Kong

Department of Economics

Shatin, N. T., Hong Kong

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ABSTRACT:

A unique survey of Shanghai residents in 1996 that combined

labor-market information, appraisals of respondents' beauty, and

household expenditures allows us to examine the relative

magnitudes of the investment and consumption components of

women's spending on beauty-enhancing goods and services. We find

that beauty raises women's earnings (and to a lesser extent,

men's) adjusted for a wide range of controls. Additional

spending on clothing and cosmetics has a generally positive but

decreasing marginal impact on a woman's perceived beauty. The

relative sizes of these effects demonstrate that such purchases

pay back at most 10 percent of each unit of expenditure in the

form of higher earnings. Most such spending represents

consumption.

JEL Classification: J19, J70



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