physical attractiveness and performance

Previous papers have shown that physical attractiveness has a positive impact on student performance. However, the past studies tend to not control for other characteristics that may be highly correlated with attractiveness, including personality and grooming. In a recent paper in Labour Economics, Michael French, Philip Robins, Jenny Homer, and Lauren Tapsell (all at U Miami) conclude:

Including personality and grooming, the effect of physical attractiveness turns negative for both groups, but is only statistically significant for males. For male and female students, being very well groomed is associated with a statistically significant GPA premium. While grooming has the largest effect on GPA for male students, having a very attractive personality is most important for female students.

Link to the paper here. Or read about it here.

domestic violence and football

David Card (Berkeley) and Gordon Dahl (Rochester) study family violence during football season, and show that (from the abstract):

Controlling for location and time fixed effects, weather factors, the pre-game point spread, and the size of the local viewing audience, we find that upset losses by the home team (losses in games that the home team was predicted to win by more than 3 points) lead to an 8 percent increase in police reports of at-home male-on-female intimate partner violence. There is no corresponding effect on female-on-male violence... We also find that unexpected losses in highly salient or frustrating games have a 50% to 100% larger impact on rates of family violence.

This is interesting, but isn't a big surprise. If Bubba beats his wife when he is frustrated, and if Bubba gets frustrated when his team loses in an upset, then an upset loss results in a beaten up wife. Card and Dahl argue that their evidence supports the hypothesis among analysts that domestic violence tends to result from a loss of control, rather than a more rational choice in an effort to shape "intra-family incentives."

Download it here, or here.

did no child left behind work?

Thomas Dee (Swarthmore) and Brian Jacob (Harvard) empirically consider the impact of No Child Left Behind legislation in the U.S. From the abstract:

Our results indicate that NCLB generated statistically significant increases in the average math performance of 4th graders as well as improvements at the lower and top percentiles. There is also evidence of improvements in 8th grade math achievement, particularly among traditionally low-achieving groups and at the lower percentiles. However, we find no evidence that NCLB increased reading achievement in either 4th or 8th grade.

From the introduction:

The lack of any effect in reading, and the fact that NCLB appears to have generated only modestly larger impacts among disadvantaged subgroups in math (and thus only made minimal headway in closing achievement gaps), suggests that, to date, the impact of NCLB has fallen short of its ambitious “moon-shot rhetoric”

Download it here, or here.

gender differences in competition go away with experience

A number of papers present evidence that males tend to perform better during competitions than females. This is true, even if we compare the performance of a male and female who both perform equally well at the task when there is no competition involved. However, the papers that find gender differences use data from one-round competitions. In a recent working paper, Christopher Cotton (this is me; U Miami), Frank McIntyre, and Joseph Price (both at BYU) test for the gender differences in a series of five-round math competitions.

From our abstract:

Past research finds that males outperform females in competitive situations. Using data from multiple-round math tournaments, we verify this finding during the initial round of competition. The performance gap between males and females, however, disappears after the first round. In later rounds, only math ability (not gender) serves as a significant predictor of performance.

The gender difference is not robust to multiple rounds of competition. The evidence supports the argument that exposing females to competition (e.g., Title IX) may eliminate performance differences.

Link to the paper here.