TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hamermesh,Daniel S.
AU  - Meng,Xin
AU  - Zhang,Junsen
TI  - Dress for Success — Does Primping Pay?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 7167
PY  - 1999
Y2  - June 1999
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7167
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7167.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Daniel S. Hamermesh
Department of Economics
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712-1173
Tel: 512/475-8526
Fax: 512/471-3510
E-Mail: hamermes@eco.utexas.edu

Xin Meng
Australian National University
E-Mail: xin.meng@anu.edu.au

Junsen Zhang
Department of Economics
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, N.T.
Hong Kong
E-Mail: jszhang@cuhk.edu.hk
AB  - A unique survey of Shanghai residents in 1996 that combined labor-market information, appraisals of respondents' beauty, and household expenditures allows us to examine the relative magnitudes of the investment and consumption components of women's spending on beauty-enhancing goods and services. We find that beauty raises women's earnings (and to a lesser extent, men's) adjusted for a wide range of controls. Additional spending on clothing and cosmetics has a generally positive but decreasing marginal impact on a woman's perceived beauty.  The relative sizes of these effects demonstrate that such purchases pay back at most 10 percent of each unit of expenditure in the form of higher earnings.  Most such spending represents consumption.
ER  -