“Beauty too rich for use”: Billionaires’ assets and attractiveness

Abstract

We examine how the net worth of billionaires relates to their looks, as rated by 16 people of different gender and ethnicity. As a group, billionaires are both more educated and better-looking than average for their age. However, when we compare among billionaires, wealth is neither related to beauty. nor to educational attainment. The results do not arise from measurement error or nonrandom sample selectivity. They are consistent with econometric theory about the impact of truncating a sample to include observations only from an extreme tail of the dependent variable. The point is underscored by comparing estimates of earnings equations using all employees in the American Community Survey to those using a sample of just the top 0.1 percent of earners. The findings suggest the powerful role of luck within the extremes of the distributions of economic outcomes. That empirical regularities tend to disappear in the far tails is relevant to analyzing any sample of highly successful or unsuccessful individuals.