Stature, Obesity, and Portfolio Choice
The link above will take you to a paper by George Korniotis and Alok Kumar, from the University of Miami, where they extend work on how physical appearance affects how many of us live our lives.
John Adams (1.7m) joked that George Washington (1.88m) was sure to become the first President of the United States on account of him always being the tallest man in the room. Marilyn Monroe (1.66m) starred in the 1953 movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes whose title required no further explanation. It’s not news then that how we look affects many of our life outcomes.
In recent years though social scientists have been trying to understand in greater detail how this process works. We now know, for example, that tall CEOs tend to run growth enterprises and obesity in women produces discrimination similar to how cigarette smokers and drug abusers are shunned in society.
The main conclusion from this paper though is that tall people are not only “Smarter, healthier, more optimistic and socially active” but they’re also more likely to participate in financial markets and hold riskier portfolios. The obese are likely to have the mirror image of these attributes.
They find that height and obesity are clear explanatory variables for certain types of behavior but ‘beauty’ (they admit a notoriously slippery concept) doesn’t seem to predict much here. Height is an indicator of a higher risk appetite for men, unless they’re abnormally tall, but doesn’t have the same reliable predictive ability for women.
Where the authors end their work is wondering if a study of money managers would show taller managers, by taking more risk, produced consistently superior returns? Hmm… I wonder? 1.82m BTW…
Now check your BMI at BMI Calculator [I squeaked in at 24.9, phew!].
Happy Sunday