Beauty and Productivity in Academic Publishing

Academic publishing represents a field in which the opportunity for discrimination based on appearance should be limited since intellectual skills must play a key role. In this work, I document the beauty effect for economic scholars. Using unique data on academics who published their research papers in economic journals in 2017 and the new machine learning technique I test whether more attractive academics are more productive. I found evidence that appearance is positively and significantly associated with the success of research output as measured by the higher number of citations, the effects are robust and statistically significant.