美貌能带来幸福感吗?

作为一项稀缺资源,好的外表能够为个体带来多重溢价和福利。文章基于中国家庭追踪调查(CFPS)数据考察了个体的外貌与主观幸福感之间的关系。研究发现,在控制了影响幸福感的其他因素之后,个体的外貌对其幸福感依然有着显著的正向影响:外貌更具吸引力的个体,其自评的生活满意度更高。外貌的这一影响在不同性别、不同年龄段和不同收入群组中均有所差异。同时,在该影响机制中,个体的经济状况扮演着中介渠道的角色。文章运用访员固定效应和工具变量估计控制了模型的内生性问题。

Can Beauty Promise Happiness?

In China, with the improvement of living standard and the settlement of food and clothing problems, people gradually attach more and more importance to their subjective happiness. The factors that could influence individuals' subjective well-being are diverse. Existing studies have found that individuals' perceptions of happiness differ not only in terms of individual characteristics such as gender, age, marriage, and educational background, but also social characteristics such as occupation, labor compensation, and unemployment. Based on the existing research, this paper focuses on the impact of individual physical appearance on subjective well-being. Good appearance can bring individuals with multiple premium and welfare. The pursuit of good looks has always been the common nature of mankind. In primitive society, beautiful appearance represents physical fitness and vigorous vitality, implying reproductive advantages and natural selection advantages. In modern society, beauty becomes a scarce resource. Individuals with beautiful appearance enjoy stronger bargaining power in various social games. Thus, they can obtain better opportunities, occupy more resources, and enjoy the so-called "beauty premium". Based on the data of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this paper investigates the relationship between physical appearance and subjective wellbeing.We construct a linear model with the subjective happiness as dependent variable and appearance as independent variable. And we also tackle the problem of endogeneity with investigator fixed effect and instrumental variable regression. We consider the interviewers' assessment of the appearance of the respondent in the 2010 survey as a tool variable for the 2012 data. The appearance of respondents in 2012 is highly correlated to that in 2012, and will not affect the subjective well-being in 2012 directly or be adversely affected by the subjective wellbeing in 2012. Our estimation results reveal that individuals with more attractive appearances tend to have higher happiness evaluation. After controlling other basic variables, the estimation coefficient of appearance variable is significantly positive at the level of 1%. And this effect differs a lot in terms of gender, age, and income. The beauty premium of subjective wellbeing for males is larger than that for females. Especially the beauty premium for females was affected by their age greatly. And the beauty premium is larger for lower income earners than those with higher income. What's more, we also found that the individual's income and asset status play an extremely important intermediary role in the mechanism. Intermediary analysis:In the mechanism of aesthetic improvement of subjective well-being, the individual's income and asset status play an extremely important intermediary role, and a considerable part of the premium is transmitted through this factor. Compared with the existing literature, the marginal contribution of this paper contains two points. First, this is the first time for Chinese paper to work on the relationship between physical appearance and subjective wellbeing. Chinese traditional culture thinks little of personal appearance. While this paper shows that the physical appearance will affect the subjective wellbeing of Chinese people. Second, this paper identifies the causal relationship between physical appearance and subjective wellbeing effectively by controlling the fixed effect of interviewers and instrumental variable.