Beauty is the promise of happiness?

•The paper measures the impact of looks (“beauty”) on life satisfaction/happiness using six datasets from four different countries.•Biases from different forms of measurement error (of the “beauty” variable) are considered.•The paper finds that beauty raises happiness, with a one-standard deviation beauty change associated with a 0.10 standard-deviation satisfaction/happiness change.•The use of covariates that proxy for intermediary effects (e.g. in the labor and marriage markets) leads to the effects being roughly cut in half.

We measure the impact of individuals' looks on life satisfaction and happiness. Using six data sets, from Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we construct beauty measures in a number of different ways. Beauty raises happiness: A one standard-deviation change in beauty generates about 0.08 standard deviations of additional satisfaction/happiness among men, 0.07 among women. The finding is robust to a rare opportunity to measure it using an instrumental variables approach. Accounting for a wide variety of covariates, particularly educational, marital, and labor-market outcomes that might be affected by beauty, the gross effects are roughly halved, with small reductions arising from the impact of beauty on monetary outcomes.