The word is used so often, it runs the risk of becoming too cliché to be useful. Not just in corporate America, but in so many facets of our life: diversity of the workforce, diversity in government, and diversity in our investment portfolios, to name a few.

They have been a staple of corporate life for half a century or more. Employees dread them. Bosses routinely put them off until they have to be done. HR executives regard them as a necessary metric – for lack of a better one – for evaluating an employee’s performance on an annual basis.

Innumerable psychology and sociology studies over the years have shown that good-looking people tend to have advantages in life over their average-looking counterparts. Now a study coming out of the University of Wisconsin makes the case that attractive chief executives can actually impact corporate metrics like shareholder value, stocks returns – even hedge-fund results and M&A transactions. So reports The New York Times’ Dealbook.