Beauty, body size and wages: Evidence from a unique data set

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record We analyze how attractiveness rated at the start of the interview in the German General Social Survey is related to weight, height, and body mass index (BMI), separately by gender and accounting for interviewers' characteristics or fixed effects. We show that height, weight, and BMI all strongly contribute to male and female attractiveness when attractiveness is rated by opposite-sex interviewers, and that anthropometric characteristics are irrelevant to male interviewers when assessing male attractiveness. We also estimate whether, controlling for beauty, body size measures are related to hourly wages. We find that anthropometric attributes play a significant role in wage regressions in addition to attractiveness, showing that body size cannot be dismissed as a simple component of beauty. Our findings are robust to controlling for health status and accounting for selection into working

Bidimensional matching with heterogeneous preferences: Education and smoking in the marriage market

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Oxford University Press (OUP) via the DOI in this record.We develop a frictionless matching model under transferable utility where individuals are characterized by a continuous trait and a binary attribute. The model incorporates attributes for which there are heterogeneous preferences in the population regarding their desirability, that is, the impact of the traits cannot be summarized by a one-dimensional attractiveness index. We present a general resolution strategy based on optimal control theory, and characterize the stable matching. We then consider education and smoking status, further specify the model by observing that there are more male than female smokers above each education level, and derive additional predictions about equilibrium matching patterns and how individuals with different smoking habits "marry down" or "marry up" by education. Using the CPS March and Tobacco Use Supplements for the period 1996-2003, we find that the hypotheses based on our model predictions are borne out in the data.NSFSpanish Ministry of Science and Innovatio

Transportation to work by sexual orientation

This is the final version. Available on open access from Public Library of Science via the DOI in this recordData Availability Statement: All data used in this work are publicly available and can be downloaded from IPUMS or from GSS. The American Community Survey can be accessed here: https:// usa.ipums.org/usa/. The General Social Survey can be accessed here: https://gss.norc.org/.We analyze differences in mode of transportation to work by sexual orientation, using the American Community Survey 2008-2019. Working individuals in same-sex couples are significantly less likely to drive to work than working men and women in different-sex couples. This gap is particularly stark among men: on average, almost 12 percentage point (or 13%) lower likelihood of driving to work for men in same-sex couples. Working individuals in same-sex couples are also more likely to use public transport, walk, or bike to work. Men and women are 7 and 3 percentage points more likely, respectively, to take public transportation to work than those in different-sex couples. Working men are also more likely to work from home-while working women are less likely-than those in different-sex couples. These differences persist after controlling for demographic characteristics, partner's characteristics, location, fertility, marital status, occupation or industry, and family income. Additional evidence from the General Social Survey 2008-2018 suggests that these disparities by sexual orientation may be due to lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals valuing the environment more than straight individuals

Commuting to work and gender norms by sexual orientation

This is the final version. Available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record. We assess the role of gender-conforming social norms in household decision-making and gender inequalities in the labor market with a parsimonious household model that endogenizes commuting time. Using the American Community Survey 2008–2019, we test the model predictions and find that women in same-sex couples have a longer commute to work than working women in different-sex couples, whereas the commute to work of men in same-sex couples is shorter than the one of working men in different-sex couples, even after controlling for demographic characteristics, partner's characteristics, location and urbanicity, fertility, marital status, industry and occupation. These differences among men and women amount to a sizable portion of the gender commuting gap estimated in the literature, and are particularly stark among married couples with children. Within-couple gaps in commuting time are also significantly smaller in same-sex couples, and labor supply disparities mimic the commuting ones. According to our model, these differences are interpreted as gender-conforming social norms leading women in different-sex couples into jobs with a shorter commute and fewer hours worked while their male partners or spouses hold jobs with a longer commute and more hours worked, thus reinforcing gender inequalities

COVID–19 Information, Demand and Willingness to Pay for Protective Gear in the UK

This is the final version. Available on open access from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this recordIn the first month of the UK first lockdown, we studied the demand and willingness to pay (WTP) for hand sanitizer gel, disposable face masks and disposable gloves, and how information on tested people and coronavirus deaths explains the demand and WTP for these products. The specific hypotheses to test and concrete questions to study were pre-registered in AsPredicted (#38962) on 10 April 2020, and an online survey was launched in Prolific on a sample of the UK general population representative by age, sex and ethnicity on 11 April 2020. We find that there is a demand for these products, estimate the average WTP for them, and show that the provision of information affected the demand (and WTP) for disposable face masks. Providing information on the numbers of coronavirus cumulative tested people and coronavirus cumulative deaths increases the stated demand for disposable face masks by about 8 percentage points [95% CI: 0.8, 15.1] and 11 percentage points [95% CI: 3.7, 18.2], respectively

Gender inequality in COVID-19 times: Evidence from UK Prolific participants

This is the final version. Available on open access from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this recordData availability: This article uses two types of data: primary and secondary. The secondary data comes from Understanding Society. Understanding Society is an initiative funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and various Government Departments, with scientific leadership by the Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, and survey delivery by NatCen Social Research and Kantar Public. The research data are distributed by the UK Data Service. The primary data (collected by the authors), questionnaire and replication files are publicly available from https://sites.google.com/site/climentquintanadomeque/covid-19-dataWe investigate gender differences across multiple dimensions after three months of the first UK lockdown of March 2020, using an online sample of approximately 1,500 Prolific respondents residents in the UK. We find that women’s mental health was worse than men’s along the four metrics we collected data on, that women were more concerned about getting and spreading the virus, and that women perceived the virus as more prevalent and lethal than men did. Women were also more likely to expect a new lockdown or virus outbreak by the end of 2020, and were more pessimistic about the contemporaneous and future state of the UK economy, as measured by their forecasted contemporaneous and future unemployment rates. We also show that, between earlier in 2020 before the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic and June 2020, women had increased childcare and housework more than men. Neither the gender gaps in COVID19-related health and economic concerns nor the gender gaps in the increase in hours of childcare and housework can be accounted for by a rich set of control variables. Instead, we find that the gender gap in mental health can be partially accounted for by the difference in COVID-19-related health concerns between men and women

The Demand for Season of Birth

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this recordWe study the determinants of season of birth for married women aged 20-45 in the US, using birth certi cate and Census data. We also elicit the willingness to pay for season of birth through discrete choice experiments implemented on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. We document that the probability of a spring rst birth is signi cantly related to mother's age, education, race, ethnicity, smoking status during pregnancy, receiving WIC food bene ts during pregnancy, pre-pregnancy obesity and the mother working in \education, training, and library" occupations, whereas among unmarried women without a father acknowledged on their child's birth certi cate, all our ndings are muted. A summer rst birth does not depend on socioeconomic characteristics, although it is the most common birth season in the US. Among married women aged 20-45, we estimate the average marginal willingness to pay (WTP) for a spring birth to be 877 USD. This implies a willingness to trade-o 560 grams of birth weight to achieve a spring birth. Finally, we estimate that an increase of 1,000 USD in the predicted marginal WTP for a spring birth is associated with a 15 pp increase in the probability of obtaining an actual spring birth

On the Value of Birth Weight

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI int this recordReplication materials are available at the Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IWINJNA large body of evidence documents the educational and labour market returns to birth weight, which are reflected in investments in large social safety net programmes targeting birth weight and early life health. However, there is no direct evidence on the private valuation of birth weight. In this paper, we estimate the willingness to pay for birth weight in the United States, using a series of discrete choice experiments. Within the normal birth weight range (2,500–4,000 g), we find that individuals are, on average, willing to pay $1.47 (95$1.24, $1.70]) for each additional gram of birth weight when the value of birth weight is estimated linearly, or$2.40 (95% CI: [$2.03,$2.77]) when the value of birth weight is estimated nonparametrically

Erratum: Fatter attraction: Anthropometric and socioeconomic matching on the marriage market

This is the final version. Available from University of Chicago Press via the DOI in this recordAlfred Galichon pointed out to us an error in our paper “Fatter Attraction: Anthropometric and Socioeconomic Matching on the Marriage Market” (Chiappori, Oreffice, and Quintana-Domeque 2012). The properties derived in the theory section (sec. III) are not sufficient to validate the empirical strategy developed in the following section; the latter requires more specific assumptions. The issue can easily be described in the TU (transferable-utility) case (sec. III.B).We use the same notation as in the initial paper. In particular, women (men) are characterized by a vector ðX, εÞ RL RK (ðY , hÞ RK RL), where X (Y) is a vector of observable female (male) characteristics and ε (h) is a random vector reflecting female (male) unobservable attributes. Proposition 2 actually implies that, for any stable matching, the conditional distribution of the female index I(X), given the male characteristics Y, depends only on the male index J(Y ), and conversely. This property can be used to empirically estimate these indexes even in the most general framework, a possibility explored in forthcoming work