Physically attractive individuals achieve greater success in terms of earnings and status than those who are less attractive. However, much about the mechanism behind this “beauty premium” remains unknown. We use a rich dataset to shed light on its nature at the college level. We find that...

Little is known about how aggregate economic shocks are mitigated by social safety nets. I use hurricanes as an exogenous shock to the economics of US counties and show that non-disaster government transfers, such as unemployment insurance and public medical spending, increase substantially in...

We design a laboratory experiment to illuminate the channels through which relatively more attractive individuals receive higher wages. Specifically, we are able to distinguish taste-based discrimination from rational statistical discrimination and biased beliefs. Using three realistic worker...

This paper provides empirical evidence of advantageous selection in insurance markets. By using a novel insurance setting where moral hazard is not a concern, I am able to overcome an important obstacle in most studies of selection: the inability to distinguish moral hazard from selection. In...