[IP] Attractive professors get better evaluations

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

> Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 12:50:48 -0400 (EDT)
> From:
> Dear Professor Farber,
>
> Here is an interesting story in yesterday's NYT.
> If you post this to IP, please don't attribute it to me :))
>
>
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/28/business/28SCEN.html
>
> ECONOMIC SCENE
> The Hunk Differential
> By HAL R. VARIAN
>
>
> BEING beautiful pays off. Economists have found that men with
> above-average looks are paid about 5 percent more than those with
> average appearance, while those who are below average in looks have
> wages 9 percent below the mean.
>
> But is this because of discrimination or productivity?
>
> ...
>
> Recently Mr. Hamermesh, a labor economist at the University of Texas
> at Austin who has long studied beauty and labor markets, wrote a paper
> with an undergraduate economics major, Amy Parker, that investigates
> the effect of beauty on a particular measure of performance: teaching
> evaluations for college professors.
>
> The economists collected teaching evaluations for 463 courses taught
> by 94 faculty members at the University of Texas at Austin, along with
> some characteristics of the instructors, like sex, race, whether they
> were on tenure track, and whether they were educated in an
> English-speaking country.
>
> ...

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