Research by Steve DeLoach and Tina Das on the effect of time spent grooming on wages was recently highlighted on Cafe.com, a human-interest digital magazine.
The article, “What you are probably doing that will cost your daughter $1.4 million,” examines grooming standards and refers to research DeLoach conducted with Tina Das, Lincoln Financial Professor of Economics.
DeLoach and Das discovered a link between the amount of time someone spends on appearance and how it impacts their wages.
The article cites findings from the professors’ paper, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: The Effect of Time Spent Grooming on Wages.”
The paper’s abstract reads:
To most economists, personal grooming is a non-market activity. The standard view is that time spent in non-market activities is counterproductive as it reduces work effort and job commitment. But grooming may be different. Grooming provides an important source of communication about workers, their values and personalities. There is reason to believe that certain productive personality traits may be inferred on the basis of personal grooming. In this paper, we use data from the American Time Use survey’s pooled cross-section 2003-2007 to investigate the effect of additional time spent grooming on earnings. The results show that the effect of grooming on earnings differs significantly by gender and race.