In a study of female undergraduates at a US college, researchers found that the most-attractive students scored about three-tenths of a standard deviation lower on standardised tests than the least-attractive students.

Thus there’s no evidence that greater intellectual ability underlies the much-studied higher earnings of good-looking people, say Tatyana Deryugina of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Olga Shurchkov of Wellesley College. Instead, the higher earnings are perhaps the result of more-attractive students’ self-selection into fields such as consulting and management, the researchers say.

(Source: Economic Inquiry)

Published in Dawn, Economic & Business, March 23rd , 2015

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