“O Youth and Beauty:” Children's looks and children's cognitive development

Abstract

We use data from the 11 waves of the U.S. Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development 1991–2005, following children from ages 6 months through 15 years. Observers rated videos of them, obtaining measures of looks at each age. Given their family income, parents’ education, race/ethnicity, and gender, being better-looking raised subsequent changes objective learning outcomes. The gains imply a long-run impact on cognitive achievement of about 0.04 standard deviations per standard deviation of differences in looks. Similarly specified models describing changes in reading and arithmetic scores at ages 7, 11 and 16 in the U.K. National Child Development Survey 1958 cohort show larger effects, 0.20 standard deviations. The extra gains persist when instrumenting children's looks by their mother's looks, and do not work through measures of teachers’ reports of closeness to children, mothers’ reports of children's behavior, their victimization by bullies, or self-confidence. Results from the U.K. data show that greater childhood beauty raises educational attainment both directly and indirectly, through impacts on test scores, thus contributing to higher adult earnings.