We use unique longitudinal data to document an economically and statistically significant positive correlation between the facial attractiveness of male high school graduates and their subsequent labor market earnings. There are only weak links between facial attractiveness and direct measures of cognitive skills and no link between facial attractiveness and mortality. Even after including a lengthy set of characteristics, including IQ, high school activities, proxy measures for confidence and personality, family background, and additional respondent characteristics in an empirical model of earnings, the attractiveness premium is present in the respondents' mid-30s and early 50s. Our findings are consistent with attractiveness being an enduring, positive labor market characteristic.

This paper examines the effects of Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) on private and national saving. We construct a formal model of dynamic utility maximization that generates closed-form equations for IRA and other saving. Our empirical estimates indicate that raising the annual IRA contribution limit between 1983 and 1986 would have resulted in little, if any, increase in national saving. Results from sensitivity analysis imply substantially smaller effects on national saving than most previous researchers have estimated. Our results are consistent with new evidence we present indicating considerable potential among IRA holders to shift taxable forms of saving into IRAs.

We solve each household’s optimal saving decisions using a life cycle model that incorporates uncertain lifetimes, uninsurable earnings and medical expenses, progressive taxation, government transfers, and pension and social security benefits. With optimal decision rules, we compare, household by household, wealth predictions from the life cycle model using a nationally representative sample. We find, making use of household‐specific earnings histories, that the model accounts for more than 80 percent of the 1992 cross‐sectional variation in wealth. Fewer than 20 percent of households have less wealth than their optimal targets, and the wealth deficit of those who are undersaving is generally small.

Welfare, Employment, and Income: Evidence on the Effects of Benefit Reductions from California by V. Joseph Hotz, Charles H. Mullin and John Karl Scholz. Published in volume 92, issue 2, pages 380-384 of American Economic Review, May 2002