“Call it the ‘C.E.O. beauty premium,'” Andrew Ross Sorkin reports for The New York Times. “Two economists say their study shows that investors assign higher share values to companies run by attractive chief executives, that these chiefs are paid more than less-appealing counterparts and that the better looking the C.E.O.’s, the better they are at undertaking financially successful deals.”
“The conclusion of the unusual academic study — a sort of corporate version of ‘Hot or Not’ — is that shareholders are as easily swayed by the glint in the eye of a chief executive as they are by a company’s actual numbers, at least in the short term,” Sorkin reports. “According to a working paper by Joseph T. Halford and Hung-Chia Hsu at the University of Wisconsin, a good-looking C.E.O.’s appearance had ‘a positive and significant impact on stock returns surrounding the first day when the C.E.O. is on the job,’ worth about 43 basis points in increased stock value compared with a C.E.O. 10 percent less attractive.”
MacDailyNews Take: You knew this was coming…
MacDailyNews Take: You’re welcome.
“Mr. Halford and Mr. Hsu loaded the pictures of 677 chief executives onto a website called anaface.com, which measures what it describes as ‘neoclassical beauty’ by looking at the symmetry of a face — ‘the ratio of nose to ear length, the ratio of eye width compared to inner-ocular distance, the ratio of nose width to face width, the ratio of face width to face height, and the ratio of mouth width to nose width,'” Sorkin reports. “Marissa Mayer, the chief executive of Yahoo, among the top 5 percent of attractive executives, according to the study, scored an 8.45 out of 10 on the Facial Attractiveness Index, or F.A.I… In comparison, the actress Angelina Jolie scored about 8.5, the economists said. Her significant other, the actor Brad Pitt, scored an 8.46. (It’s worth noting that the average score was no different between male and female chief executives.)”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: For kicks, we threw Tim Cook’s official Apple bio photo into anaface.com and it returned a “facial beauty score” of 6.93.
We also ran Steve Jobs’ classic Apple bio photo through Anaface and it scored 8.22.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “David G.” for the heads up.]