The Labor Market Return to an Attractive Face: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By F. Boo, Martín A. Rossi, Sergio S. Urzúa. Social Science Research Network, 2012

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We provide new evidence on the link between beauty and hiring practices in the labor market. Specifically, we study if people with less attractive faces are less likely to be contacted after submitting a resume. Our empirical strategy is based on an experimental approach. We sent fictitious resumes with pictures of attractive and unattractive faces to real job openings in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We find that attractive people receive 36 percent more responses (callbacks) than unattractive people. Given the experimental design, this difference can be attributed to the exogenous manipulation of facial attractiveness of our fake job applicants.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d31adb6fdfa16fd7dd0192c4bc3221307175c87e

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In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

A multidisciplinary survey on discrimination analysis (2013, background): “Other grounds of discrimination covered by correspondencetesting in job applications include sex (Riach & Rich, 2006; Booth & Leigh, 2010), obesity, and physical appearance (Rooth, 2009; Bóo et al., 2012), sexual orientation (Drydakis, 2009), ethnicity (McGinnity et al.”
Discrimination Against Female Migrants Wearing Headscarves (2016, background): “Exceptions are correspondence tests that measured the effect of physical attractiveness on employment chances (e.g. López Bóo et al. 2013, Rooth 2009, Ruffle and Shtudiner 2015).”
Race and Marriage in the Labor Market: A Discrimination Correspondence Study in a Developing Country (2014, background): “It is important to clarify that a 8 We chose the following names: Alejandro Flores Álvarez, Antonio González Lara, Carlos Romero Gómez, Javier Rodríguez Mendoza, Claudia García Ramírez, Gabriela López Acosta, Mariana Hernández Silva, Mónica Vázquez Rivera.”