How beauty leads to better jobs, better wages, and better spouses

Most of us know there is a payoff to looking good, and in the quest for beauty we spend countless hours and billions of dollars on personal grooming, cosmetics, and plastic surgery. But how much better off are the better looking? Based on the evidence, quite a lot. The first book to seriously measure the advantages of beauty, Beauty Pays demonstrates how society favors the beautiful and how better-looking people experience startling but undeniable benefits in all aspects of life. Noted economist Daniel Hamermesh shows that the attractive are more likely to be employed, work more productively and profitably, receive more substantial pay, obtain loan approvals, negotiate loans with better terms, and have more handsome and highly educated spouses. Hamermesh explains why this happens and what it means for the beautiful--and the not-so-beautiful--among us.

Exploring whether a universal standard of beauty exists, Hamermesh illustrates how attractive workers make more money, how these amounts differ by gender, and how looks are valued differently based on profession. He considers whether extra pay for good-looking people represents discrimination, and, if so, who is discriminating. Hamermesh investigates the commodification of beauty in dating and how this influences the search for intelligent or high-earning mates, and even examines whether government programs should aid the ugly. He also discusses whether the economic benefits of beauty will persist into the foreseeable future and what the looks-challenged can do to overcome their disadvantage.

Reflecting on a sensitive issue that touches everyone, Beauty Pays proves that beauty's rewards are anything but superficial.

Originally presented at a Conference on Labor in Nonprofit Industry and Government held at Princeton University, these studies are the first to provide an economic discussion of the public sector labor market.

Melvin Reder examines the effect of the absence of the profit motive on employment and wage determination in the public sector. Orley Ashenfelter and Ronald Ehrenberg estimate the elasticities of demand for various types of labor employed by state and local governments. Theoretical ideas about behavior in nonprofit industries are employed by Richard Freeman to study the higher education industry.

John Burton and Charles Krider try to predict the incidence of strikes in the public sector, while Donald Frey presents a model of the behavior of school boards in hiring faculty. The magnitude of the extra wage received by unionized public employees is compared by Daniel Hamermesh to that of private unionized workers in the same occupation.

Originally published in 1975.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Time is the ultimate scarce resource and thus quintessentially a topic for economics, which studies scarcity. Starting with the observation that time is increasingly valuable given competing demands as we have more things we can buy and do, Spending Time provides engaging insights into how people use their time and what determines their decisions about spending their time.

That our time is limited by the number of hours in a day, days in a year, and years in our lives means that we face constraints and thus choices that involve trade-offs. We sleep, eat, have fun, watch TV, and not least we work. How much we dedicate to each, and why we do so, is intriguing and no one is better placed to shed light on similarities and differences than Daniel S. Hamermesh, the leading authority on time-use. Here he explores how people use their time, including across countries, regions, cultures, class, and gender.

Americans now work more than people in other rich countries, but as recently as the late 1970s they worked no more than others; and they also work longer into older age. Men and women do different things at different times of the day, which affects how well-off they feel. Both the arrival of children and retirement create major shocks to existing time uses, with differences between the sexes. Higher incomes and higher wage rates lead people to hurry more, both on and off the job, and higher wage rates lead people to cut back on activities that take time away from work.

Being stressed for time is central to modern life, and Hamermesh shows who is rushed, and why. With Americans working more than people in France, Germany, the U.K., Japan and other rich countries, the book offers a simple but radical proposal for changing Americans' lives and reducing the stress about time.

Beginning in 1965 Nobel Laureate Gary Becker realized that shadow prices, which reflect the value of one's time, may be at least as important as money prices. Implications of his resulting theory of time allocation were not tested until much later when governments began to collect extensive data on how individuals utilized their time.

Time Use in Economics contains original research on new aspects of time use compiled by Daniel S. Hamermesh, a long-time path-breaking labor economist leader in analyzing time use data, and Solomon W. Polachek, a pioneer in gender-related labor market research. Topics include how time is used by type of household, how time is used in particular jobs, how time is used in high versus low growth geographic areas, how time is used after a job loss, how time use affects individual wellbeing, as well as how to interpret the blurred boundaries of time use between leisure and work, a growing issue as more individuals, especially mothers, work from home.

In this book Daniel Hamermesh provides the first comprehensive picture of the disparate field of labor demand. The author reviews both the static and dynamic theories of labor demand, and provides evaluative summaries of the available empirical research in these two subject areas. Moreover, he uses both theory and evidence to establish a generalized framework for analyzing the impact of policies such as minimum wages, payroll taxes, job- security measures, unemployment insurance, and others. Covering every aspect of labor demand, this book uses material from a wide range of countries.

Originally presented at a Conference on Labor in Nonprofit Industry and Government held at Princeton University, these studies are the first to provide an economic discussion of the public sector labor market.

Melvin Reder examines the effect of the absence of the profit motive on employment and wage determination in the public sector. Orley Ashenfelter and Ronald Ehrenberg estimate the elasticities of demand for various types of labor employed by state and local governments. Theoretical ideas about behavior in nonprofit industries are employed by Richard Freeman to study the higher education industry.

John Burton and Charles Krider try to predict the incidence of strikes in the public sector, while Donald Frey presents a model of the behavior of school boards in hiring faculty. The magnitude of the extra wage received by unionized public employees is compared by Daniel Hamermesh to that of private unionized workers in the same occupation.

Originally published in 1975.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

These studies are based on information on time use in nine countries. Such studies will become more common as more governments fund time-budget surveys and as economists realize the benefits of using this type of data. Each does something that either could not have been accomplished at all, or that could have been done much less convincingly on the data that one typically obtains from households. Part I deals with the when? and with whom? questions describing human behavior. These questions have been essentially ignored by social scientists generally, and have been completely ignored by economists. So long as we believe that people have preferences over the timing and the context of their activities, we should be able to apply economic analysis usefully to their decisions. Part II deals with what is done? questions of the quantities and determinants of economic activities.While many of these questions have been addressed using readily available retrospective data, time-diary data allow both recording them more accurately and the kind of disaggregation by type that is not possible with other kinds of data. Part III deals with children's issues - the determination of time spent at home with children and its impacts on the parents and on the children themselves. Here we have economic analyses using detailed time-diary data and special survey questions that have not heretofore been used to address these topics. Part IV consists of a single study focussed on the issues involved in the creation of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which began full-scale operations in January 2003.