We analyze a sample of nearly 40,000 gender-targeted online job vacancies in Vietnam from February 2019 to July 2020 to estimate wage offer premia for physical attractiveness and how they vary between genders. Specifically, we compare the monthly wages offered in matched vacancies with and without attractiveness requirements for job advertisements targeting men and women separately. Our findings indicate that physically attractive women are offered a wage premium of about five percentage points, whereas physically attractive men are not. Further analysis reveals that gender differences in the wage offer premia to physical attractiveness are mainly driven by attitudes toward gender roles and the perceived lack of fit rather than by the potential productivity-enhancing effects of physical attractiveness in certain occupations.

We report a laboratory experiment testing whether social reference points impact effort provision. Subjects are randomly assigned the role of worker or peer and the worker observes the peer’s earnings before participating in a real-effort task. Between treatments, we exogenously manipulate peer earnings. We find that the workers recall the earnings of their peer and are less satisfied with their own earnings when their peer earns more. Despite this, we do not observe a treatment effect in effort choices. Thus, although our subjects appear to care about income differentials, this does not translate to a change in behavior in our incentivized environment. We relate our results to recent studies of inequality and effort provision.