Short on your luck? Research finds tall people earn more at work
Feeling short on your luck at work? You're probably not very tall, then.
New research has found that taller people are expected to earn more in the workplace.
Researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research tracked the fortunes of more than 5,000 Indonesian men over seven years.
Read more: How to make workers more productive without paying them more
They found that taller people tended to collect more on average in earnings. An extra 15cm in height, for instance, resulted in around an additional 1,000 Indonesian rupiah (about 5p) in hourly earnings.
“There is no question that height is rewarded in the labour market over and above all other controls," Duncan Thomas, one of the researchers, told Bloomberg.
“It's not that height is just a proxy for cognition, and it's not just a proxy for other measures of health. It is rewarded in and of itself.”
Read more: Here's how your height might be costing you money
The study concentrated on men working in a variety of roles, from farming to office work. For the study, the researchers controlled for education, cognitive performance, physical health and measures of family background.
The research said: “The height premium is large and significant in both the waged and self-employed sectors indicating height is not only a signal of worker quality.”