We measure the impact of individuals' looks on life satisfaction/happiness. Using five data sets, from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Germany, we construct beauty measures in different ways that allow placing lower bounds on the effects of beauty. Beauty raises happiness: A one...

Using a very large sample of matched author-referee pairs, we examine how the gender of referees and authors affects the former's recommendations. Relying on changing matches of authors and referees, we find no evidence of gender differences among referees in charitableness toward authors; nor...

Adjusted for many other determinants, beauty affects earnings; but does it lead directly to the differences in productivity that we believe generate earnings differences? We take a large sample of student instructional ratings for a group of university professors, acquire six independent...

The American Time Use Survey 2003-15, the French Enquête Emploi du Temps, 2009-10, and the German Zeitverwendungserhebung, 2012-13, have sufficient observations to allow examining the theory of household production in much more detail than ever before. We identify income effects on time use by...

In economics many articles are subjected to multiple rounds of refereeing at the same journal, which generates time costs of referees alone of at least $50 million. This process leads to remarkably longer publication lags than in other social sciences. We examine whether repeated refereeing...

We summarize recent research on the wage and employment effects of minimum wage laws in the U.S. and infer from non-U.S. studies of hours laws the likely effects of unchanging U.S. hours laws. Minimum wages in the U.S. have increasingly become a province of state governments, with the effective...

We examine how the net worth of billionaires relates to their looks, as rated by 16 people of different gender and ethnicity. Surprisingly, their financial assets are unrelated to their beauty; nor are they related to their educational attainment. As a group, however, billionaires are both more...

By age 77 a plurality of women in wealthy Western societies are widows. Comparing older (aged 70+) married women to widows in the American Time Use Survey 2003-18 and linking the data to the Current Population Survey allow inferring the short- and longer-term effects of an arguably exogenous...

Publishing in economics proceeds much more slowly on average than in the natural sciences, and more slowly than in other social sciences and finance. It is even relatively slower at the extremes. We demonstrate that much of the lag, especially at the extremes, arises from authors' dilatory...

Using Dutch time-diary data from 1975-2005 covering over 10,000 respondents for 7 consecutive days each, we show that individuals' sleep time exhibits both variability and volatility characterized by stationary autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity: The absolute values of deviations from...