We measure the impact of individuals’ looks on their life satisfaction or happiness. Using four data sets, the Quality of American Life surveys from the 1970s, the British National Child Development Study, and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey, we construct the beauty measures in different ways that allow putting a lower bound on the true effects of beauty. Personal beauty raises happiness, wit...

Notions of beauty have evolved through history and are culture-specific. In the Western world one concept which has been linked to beauty is that of kalokagathía, an ideal that unites physical beauty and moral value in a human being. This notion was inherited from Antiquity and was modified during the Middle Ages, when much more attention was paid to the fate of the soul, and further modified d...

This paper develops a general equilibrium exchange rate model consistent with the weak empirical evidence supporting the law of one price. Some firms segment markets by country, and set prices in local currency of sale, a practice we refer to as pricing-to-market (PTM). The presence of PTM increases exchange rate volatility, relative to a situation where the law of one price holds. PTM also aff...

Beauty is described by notions such as attractiveness, loveliness, exquisiteness, and splendor, while human-beings experience beauty in response to visual and auditory stimuli as embedded in open systems that co-evolve with the environment in which they are immersed (Cook et al., 2014). Shared experiences of beauty are considered as exceptionally intense forms of communication, thereby connecti...

A growing literature claims beautiful workers receive higher wages. Using five nationallevel surveys, we find that in multivariate regression models there is no beauty premium. Most beauty coefficients are statistically insignificant, even in replications of published work. Simple model alterations, such as clustering on the primary sampling unit or redefining other covariates, eliminate much o...

Women's ability to broadly conceptualize beauty (i.e., perceive many looks, appearances, body sizes/shapes, and inner characteristics as beautiful) has been identified as a facet of positive body image in qualitative research. A scale is needed to be able to assess this construct within quantitative research. Therefore, we developed the Broad Conceptualization of Beauty Scale (BCBS), which meas...