During the first debate before the 1960 Presidential election, Vice-President Richard Nixon looked so haggard that his mother called to ask if he was ill. His opponent, Senator John F. Kennedy, was relaxed, confident, and authoritative, and pundits were quick to declare Kennedy the victor. But not everyone watched the debate on TV, and some pollsters claimed that radio listeners preferred Nixon’s performance to Kennedy’s. This surprising reversal implied that TV viewers had been taken in by Kennedy’s good looks, whereas radio listeners assessed the candidates’ arguments on their merits, unclouded by the fog of physical appearance. That claim persists, though some researchers argue that the absence of reliable data makes it impossible to know whether TV viewers and radio listeners truly diverged.

Researchers today are no less interested in how physical appearance shapes political and economic outcomes. Half a century after Kennedy debated Nixon, the economist Daniel Hamermesh, from the University of Texas, coined the portmanteau pulchrinomics, the economic study of beauty. Hamermesh and his colleagues have produced a large body of research that is fascinating, if disconcerting: the basic principle of pulchrinomics is that beauty drives economic success. In a 1994 study, Hamermesh and the economist Jeff Biddle examined the income of several thousand U.S. and Canadian workers. When the workers were interviewed, in the late nineteen-seventies, the interviewers recorded their earnings and surreptitiously rated the attractiveness of their faces. Workers who were judged more attractive than average earned a five per cent premium over those of average attractiveness, who in turn earned about ten per cent more than those who were judged less attractive than average. The effect was slightly greater for men than for women, and the attractive members of both genders tended to pursue professions that capitalized on their looks. (James Surowiecki wrote about Hamermesh’s research in 2012.)

New research shows that companies may benefit from appointing attractive C.E.O.s. Late last month, two economists at the University of Wisconsin released a working paper showing that S. & P. 500 companies enjoy greater stock returns when they name new C.E.O.s who are relatively attractive. The researchers ran head shots of the six hundred and seventy-seven C.E.O.s of S. & P. 500 companies through a program that calculates the attractiveness of faces based on the position of seventeen facial criteria. After the program assigned each C.E.O. a score between zero and ten, the researchers calculated the effect of a new C.E.O.’s attractiveness on stock returns for the five days after the appointment was announced. For each point of C.E.O. attractiveness on the ten-point scale, a company gained, on average, a one-per-cent boost to its stock price. This suggests that the benefits of attractiveness radiate far beyond a single individual. Research suggests not only that attractive people enjoy higher incomes but that the shareholders who invest in their companies profit as well.

It’s possible, of course, that physical beauty often enhances characteristics that are genuinely useful in the workplace, such as charisma and negotiating skills, which themselves bring about better financial outcomes. In an Argentinean study, for example, twosomes of people negotiated over ten pesos. In each pair, one negotiator allocated a proportion of that ten-peso sum to the second negotiator, who could either accept that offer or reject it, so that both parties received nothing. Allocators tended to offer up to twice as much to attractive recipients than to those who were of below-average attractiveness. The discrepancy vanished when the negotiators communicated verbally but couldn’t see what the other looked like. Another study examined the relationship between a C.E.O.’s attractiveness and his or her ability to negotiate favorable corporate deals. Attractive C.E.O.’s tended to get bigger stock-price bumps for their companies after announcing mergers and acquisitions. Despite these results, the evidence is mixed, with some researchers failing to find a relationship between attractiveness and job performance. Another possibility, then, is that people tend to assume that beauty comes with other desirable traits, so they reward attractive people with the benefit of the doubt, and with a small income premium. Researchers run statistical analyses to try to eliminate some of these alternative explanations, but the possibility remains that other factors are responsible for the relationship between beauty and earnings.

Regardless of why beauty pays, there is a downside for recipients of this particular form of largesse. In 2004, Naomi Wolf claimed that Harold Bloom had placed his hand on her thigh when he was her undergraduate English professor at Yale. Twenty years later, she wrote, she continued to wonder whether she was both beautiful and talented or merely beautiful; perhaps Bloom, and others before him, had played up her talents because they found her appealing, rather than because she was genuinely capable. This self-destructive form of rumination, known as attributional ambiguity, afflicts people who aren’t sure whether to attribute their successes to genuine ability or to some other cause. Wolf was concerned that her accomplishments may have reflected her appearance rather than her talent. Affirmative-action policies can have a similar effect, sometimes causing racial and ethnic minorities to question whether their successes reflect genuine ability or bureaucratic tokenism. Attributional ambiguity is particularly likely when feedback is subjective, as it was for Wolf, who relied on the idiosyncratic praise of her professors.

The relationship between appearance and financial success is unsettling because it offends our contemporary conception of fairness; it challenges the idea, popularized by Horatio Alger, that it’s possible to improve a bad hand with hard work and perseverance. There is a silver lining, however, and it’s precisely the resolution Alger might have chosen. When Hamermesh, the economist who pioneered pulchrinomics, was asked whether any other factor could compete with attractiveness, he responded that “each additional year of education represents a ten per cent increase in earning potential.” (This may well be true: in their lifetime, people with a master’s degree earn, on average, four hundred thousand dollars more than those with only a bachelor’s degree.) Pretty smiles and defined cheekbones count for something, but education ultimately turns out to be fairer than them all.

Adam Alter is the author of “Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave,” and an assistant professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Above: Jack Dorsey. Photograph by Dennis Van Tine/Geisler-Fotopres/DPA/Corbis.