We analyze how attractiveness rated at the start of the interview in the German General Social Survey is related to weight, height, and body mass index (BMI), separately by gender and accounting for interviewers' characteristics or fixed effects. We show that height, weight, and BMI all strongly contribute to male and female attractiveness when attractiveness is rated by opposite-sex interviewers, and that anthropometric characteristics are irrelevant to male interviewers when assessing male attractiveness. We also estimate whether, controlling for beauty, body size measures are related to hourly wages. We find that anthropometric attributes play a significant role in wage regressions in addition to attractiveness, showing that body size cannot be dismissed as a simple component of beauty. Our findings are robust to controlling for health status and accounting for selection into working.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 113. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 09 February 2026.
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Outputs from Economics & Human Biology
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#6,861
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Outputs of similar age from Economics & Human Biology
#2
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Altmetric has tracked 34,245,361 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 98th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,053 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 19.5. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 96% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 19 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 89% of its contemporaries.
