No wonder I'm so loaded...

The left-handers' revenge: Better pay for men

A new study concludes left-handed men earn more than right-handed ones.

August 10 2006: 1:37 PM EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Left-handed men, often seen as having an advantage over right-handed counterparts in sports like tennis, also enjoy much better paydays, a new study says.

Left-handed men with at least some college education earned 15 percent more than similarly educated right-handers, while those who finished college earned about 26 percent more, wrote Christopher S. Ruebeck of Lafayette College, and Joseph Harrington and Robert Moffitt of Johns Hopkins University in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

A left hand holding money.

There are "several suggestive and economically and statistically significant results that suggest further support for the notion that handedness matters," they wrote. "We do not have a theory that reconciles all of these findings."

The researchers did not find a similar effect among women.

The data used for the study were hourly earnings taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a set of surveys including individuals aged 14-21 in 1979 who were interviewed every year until 1994 and every other year thereafter.