Friday, April 26, 2013

Questions the World Wants Answered "How quickly does hotness fade?"

From Worthwhile Canadian Initiative:
Ratemyprofessors.com allows students to grade a professor's clarity, helpfulness, ease and - just for fun - rate their appearance as "hot" or "not". A professor with more hot than not votes is awarded a chili pepper on the ratemyprofessors.com web site.

Hotness declines with age, but how quickly? To find out, I combined ratemyprofessors hotness scores with information on when professors acquired their PhD - the best available measure of a professor's age (this information was gathered jointly with my co-author, Anindya Sen, and his co-authors). 
Screen shot 2013-04-25 at 4.54.35 AM
The locally weighted smoothed scatterplot (lowess) line above shows that a male economics professor's hotness peaks shortly after he has completed his PhD, and declines steadily from there. An ordinary least squares regression on the 306 male Ontario economics professors in our sample finds that the relationship between years since PhD and hotness is statistically significant: a male professor's probability of being  rated hot by his students falls by 0.5 percentage points with each passing year (p=0.003 - the same results are obtained by a probit analysis).

The relationship between hotness and age for female professors appears, at first glance, to be similar to the male graph...MORE