Facial Masculinity and Academic Research Performance

Abstract

Folk wisdom believes “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. However, many studies find that an individual’s appearance is a strong predictor to the person’s behaviour. This paper aims to validate if one can actually “judge” a finance scholar’s academic research performance by the person’s facial masculinity, which is gauged by the facial width-height-ratio. By examining the finance scholars from the top 50 US institutions on the Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings 2021, I find that there are evident differences in research productivity between the scholars with the high and low facial width-height-ratio, measured in both quantity and quality. Particularly, I document that the more facial-masculine scholars outperform the less facial-masculine scholars by 13% and 14% for the productivity quantity and quality, respectively. However, the differences seemingly exist only in male but not female scholars. My findings are robust to fitting estimation with different models as well as testing the relationship among different sub-samples.