It pays to be tall.

A series of academic studies over the past 40 years has shown that taller men earn more money, are hired and promoted more quickly, and even have better love lives.

In one of the most widely publicized studies, researchers at the University of Florida and University of North Carolina found in 2003 that each extra inch of a man's height was worth an additional $789 in annual pay.

"If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we're talking about literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage that a tall person enjoys," said Timothy Judge, a University of Florida management professor who helped oversee the study.

In 2004, a University of Michigan economics professor said that the earnings gap actually begins in the teenage years. "Being relatively short through the teen years," said professor Dan Silverman, "essentially determines" the negative wage gap later on.

The height advantage shows up in other areas, too.

Only five of America's 43 presidents have been shorter than the average height of their day, and a study of more than 6,000 adolescents in the 1960s showed the taller boys were the first to get dates, exceeded only by the group that got to choose their own clothes.

Last year, a French study went even further, asserting that in a representative sample of 2,000 men, nearly three-quarters of the men taller than 5-feet-10 were married or in a long-term relationship, compared with just 60 percent of men shorter than 5-feet-5.

Study author Nicolas Herpin didn't want to leave shorter men feeling too diminished, though.

These men, he said, "having remained single longer ... have acquired greater maturity when forming a binding relationship. They have shown they are hard workers and therefore look like reliable providers; in sum, they are in a position to compensate for their physical handicap."