The Role of Body Size in Economic Research Above and Beyond Beauty

Abstract

We analyze how attractiveness rated at the start of the interview in a nation- ally representative sample is related to weight, height, and body mass index (BMI), separately by gender and accounting for interviewers' characteristics or fixed effects. We also compute the non-anthropometric residual attractiveness, and present novel estimates of how non-anthropometric attractiveness and anthropometric attributes are related to labor and marital outcomes such as hourly wage and spousal educa- tion. We show that height, weight, and BMI all strongly contribute to male and female attractiveness when attractiveness is rated by opposite-sex interviewers, and that anthropometric characteristics are irrelevant to male interviewers when assessing male attractiveness. In addition, we estimate that non-anthropometric attractiveness and height matter for both men and women in the labor market, while BMI plays a stronger role than (residual) beauty in the marriage market.