blondes make more money

In a new paper in Economics Letters, David Johnston (Queensland Tech) shows that controlling for other characteristics, blonde women receive significantly higher wages than non-blondes. What's more, blonde women seem to have an advantage in the marriage market, snagging husbands who themselves have higher wages.

Link to the paper here.

beauty and success in elections

In the February issue of the Journal of Public Economics, Niclas Berggren, Henrik Jordahl, and Panu Poutvaara present evidence that a political candidate's physical beauty affects voting in elections. Using data on 1929 Finnish political candidates, the researchers show that (from their abstract):

An increase in our measure of beauty by one standard deviation is associated with an increase of 20% in the number of votes fro the average non-incumbent parliamentary candidate. The relationship is unaffected by including education and occupation as control variables and withstands several other robustness checks.