Beauty Pays! Professor Daniel Hamermesh from UT's economics department has been studying the impact of beauty in labor income.
It turns out this is indeed serious research and Dr. Hamermesh has demonstrated the effectof beauty into income in a variety of different situations. Here's an example: in the paper "Beauty in the Classroom" they showed that "...instructors who are viewed as better looking receive higher instructional ratings" leading to a direct impact in the salaries in the long run.
By now, you should know that this is a hard effect to measure. Not only one has to workhard to figure out a way to measure "beauty" objectively, but one also needs to "adjust for many other determinants" (gender, lower division class, native language, tenure track status).
Using the file "BeautyData.csv"
1.)Using the data, estimate the effect of "beauty" into course ratings. Make sure tothink about the potential many "other determinants". Describe your analysis and your conclusions.
2.)In his paper, Dr. Hamermesh has the following sentence: "Disentangling whetherthis outcome represents productivity or discrimination is, as with the issue generally, probably impossible". Using the concepts we have talked about so far, what does he mean by that?