“Beauty and Stock Market Participation”, Hongwu Gan, Shengfeng Lu, Weijie Lu, Geng Niu, Yang Zhou2023-10 (economics)⁠:

This paper investigates whether beauty, an important natural endowment, affects investment decisions.

Using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey (WLS), which provides a photo-based measure of facial beauty, we find that:

better-looking individuals are more likely to own stocks and invest a larger share of wealth in stocks. We consider a wide range of potential mediators that may drive this relationship between beauty and stock market participation. We find that income and sociability explain a large portion of the beauty effect. For both males and females, beauty has a statistically-significant positive impact on stock market participation.

Using another dataset that includes the interviewer’s rating of the respondent’s physical attractiveness, we find similar results.

Our study contributes to a better understanding of the economic returns to beauty and the source of heterogeneity in household portfolio choice.