Having it easy: Discrimination and specialization in the workplace

Kapoor, Sacha; Magesan, Arvind

doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2019.08.019

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 41 publications

(34 reference statements)

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“…So far, the economic literature has shown that attractiveness affects a vast number of outcomes. Good-looking individuals tend to be happier (Hamermesh and Abrevaya, 2013), earn higher wages (Mobius and Rosenblat, 2006;Bonilla et al, 2019), find better jobs (Harper, 2000), carry out better tasks on the workplace (Kapoor and Maegsan, 2019;Stinebrickner et al, 2019), charge higher prices (Jaeger et al, 2019) and achieve higher cognitive outcomes (Hamermesh et al, 2019). They are able to build better social networks (O'Connor and Gladstone, 2018), have higher access to credit (Ravina et al, 2008), are viewed as more trustworthy (Wilson and Eckel, 2006) and, if economists, they have higher chances to be elected as officer of the American Economic Association (Hamermesh, 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beautiful Inequality: Are Beautiful People More Willing To Redistribute?

Fazio

2020

SSRN Journal

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As winners of the "genetic lottery", beautiful people have several advantages over their life course: they earn more, find better jobs, and are happier than their peers. We investigate whether good-looking individuals are willing to share their fortune by supporting income redistribution. Using German data, we show that beauty is associated with lower support for redistribution. Furthermore, we show that attractive individuals are more likely to believe that income should be based solely on individual achievements. To check whether the set of questions used to measure taste for redistribution captures the underlying preferences, we then investigate a possible correlation between voting behavior and beauty. We show that beauty correlates with voting for the Free Democratic Party (FDP) thus suggesting that the correlation between beauty and preferences for redistribution is channeled through party affiliation. Our findings resist to a broad set of robustness checks. A plausible mechanism that drives our findings is the self-serving bias, that is to say: people tend to attribute success to their own merit and failure to external factors. Overall, our results suggest that benefiting from random luck, such as winning the "genetic lottery", reduces taste for redistribution.

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