Humail2

Humail2

Wages, intelligence and physical appearance Martín Tetaz U.N.L.P U.N.N.o.B.A.

Abstract The paper explores the relation among wages, intelligence and Physical appearance. We find the later to influence the former, but once IQ is accounted for, the effect vanishes, showing that physical appearance may be a signal that actually indicates the cognitive ability possesed by the workers. Small and medium firms, lacking technologies to properly estimate the ability of their applicants, may rely on physical appearance as a substitue. We finnaly disscuse some explanations of the effect found. JEL code; J3, J7, D3

Introduction Since the seminal work of Mincer (1974) many economist have regressed wages on different sets of attributes including intelligence (Card, 1992; Arias et. al. 2001; Meghir 2005; Plug 2000), behavioral traits (Bowles, 2001; Kwon et. al. 2001), sibling characteristics and birth order (Dancer, et.at 2004), family influences (Becker 1993; Bound et. al. 1986), gender (Oaxaca, 1973;Blau et. al. 1996; del Rio et. al. 2003), race (Neal, 1996; Heckman 1998), socioeconomic influences (Herrnstein et. al. 1994; Psacharopolous, 2002), health status (Schultz, 1985), public vs. private hiring (Tetaz, 2005a), and so on. Some scholars have gone even farther. Hamermesh et. al. (1994) found “beauty” to influence wages, Persico et. al. (2004) do the same for “height” but they were not the first; Sargent, et. al. (1994) coupled this with the “obesity effect”. More precisely, Loh et. al. (1993) draw on “The economic effects of physical appearance”, but to our knowledge there was no attempt to relate physical attributes to intelligence, and therefore explain why such a premium exist, in a meaningful way. In this paper we explore the relation between physical appearance and wages. In so doing we will try to find out whether the influence is mediated by cognitive factors. The paper develops as follow; in the next section we will discusse some theoretical issues in...