

Study: Left-Handed Males Earn 15% More Than Right-Handed Males (All College Educated) - vlad
http://www.econ.jhu.edu/pdf/papers/wp533harrington.pdf

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vlad
"Our findings are quite contrary to expectations. We do not find any evidence
that left-handed individuals earn less, as might be suggested by the
literature referred to above which generally finds that left-handed people
tend to suffer more from factors that would reduce labor productivity. On the
contrary, we find that left-handed individuals with higher levels of education
have higher earnings than right-handed-individuals. More specifically, among
the college-educated men in our sample, those who report being left- handed
earn 15 percent more than those who report being right-handed. The size of
this effect is economically and statistically significant."

"...Left-handers have a 3.5 percent greater return to a year of education than
right-handers, whose return to a year of education is 4.6 percent; hence left-
handers have a return of education of 8.1 percent (= 3.5 + 4.6). We therefore
pursue this education difference in detail."

"We still estimate a 15.9 percentage point larger increase in wages for left-
than right-handed men for completing some college, and a 26 percentage point
larger increase for completing college (in both cases compared to completing
no college)."

"The difference occurs only in the group with 16 or more years of education:
of men entering college, those that are left-handed have a return to
completing a college education that is 16.4 percentage points higher than the
23.4 percent return received by those that are right-handed."

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kyro
Left-handed males are also supposed to die a significant amount of years
earlier than right-handed males. :P

Maybe I'll be able to salvage those years if I slice off my hand.

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SwellJoe
Just invest your extra 15% wisely, and remake your local world in a left-
handed friendly fashion. I've heard that part of the reason for the lower
lifespan is increased accidents among lefties due to the clear favoritism for
right-handers in the world (one might say reality has a clear right-handed
bias).

But, I'm left-handed and not _too_ worried about it. If it were a dramatic
difference in lifespan, I guess we'd be even fewer in number than we are.

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ConradHex
>If it were a dramatic difference in lifespan...

Maybe. But lefties could easily die, say, 10 years earlier on average, in
theory, and still have plenty of time to pass on their genes.

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wastedbrains
Sweet I will count this as a plus, since being short means statistically I get
paid less. Put them together and I probably earn what I deserve... Being in a
start up I currently each 0.

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paraschopra
Another instance of statistical randomness taken at its face value.

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jrockway
As breck describes above, it's not random when you discard the data you don't
want :)

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pierrefar
It is random if you randomly select which data you don't want and keep
repeating till you get a significant result!

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jrockway
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

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zandorg
I'm left-handed with a degree, currently earning 0% of right-handed males...

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breck
lol. You would be dropped from their study then. If you read the report, they
drop a lot of outlier data points. Which is something to watch out for in
general, as it means the researchers may have been biasing their results(most
likely unintentionally) to find something they could report as significant.

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ConradHex
Someone should make a T-shirt that says "I'm an outlier data point."

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SwellJoe
I need to give myself a raise.

