"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