Beautiful Inside and Out: Peer Characteristics and Academic Performance

This paper explores the effect of own and peer attractiveness on various measures of academic performance. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we focus on high school students in the United States and exploit random variation within schools across cohorts in adolescents’ physical and personality attractiveness as assessed by the interviewer. We find that for girls only own personality attractiveness boosts academic outcomes. For boys instead, both own physical and personality attractiveness positively affect performance and peer characteristics also matter. An increase in the fraction of physically attractive high school peers decreases boys' academic performance in later years. We show that this effect is driven by less physically mature boys and operates through a decrease in self-confidence.

Adamopoulou, Effrosyni und Ezgi Kaya (2024), Beautiful Inside and Out: Peer Characteristics and Academic Performance, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 217 , 507-532