Beauty and Accounting Academic Career

Yanju Liu, Hai Lu, Kevin Veenstra*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    1 Citation (Scopus)

    Abstract

    We examine the impact of beauty on the academic career success of tenure-track accounting professors at top business schools in America and show that beauty plays a significant role. Specifically, after controlling for gender, ethnicity, publication history, work experience, and quality of alma mater, more attractive professors obtain better first school placements post-PhD and are granted tenure in a shorter period of time. These findings are broadly consistent with behavioral theory which predicts that facial attractiveness irrationally affects the perception of performance characteristics. Interestingly, there is no incremental benefit of attractiveness for the career progression from associate to full professor. This finding is consistent with the notion that the role played by beauty in promotion diminishes when the individual’s ability and competency become apparent over time.
    Original languageEnglish
    Number of pages18
    JournalJournal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance
    DOIs
    Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 25 Aug 2022

    Scopus Subject Areas

    • Accounting
    • Economics, Econometrics and Finance (miscellaneous)
    • Finance

    User-Defined Keywords

    • accounting
    • beauty
    • career
    • labor market

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