Working Paper: NBER ID: w29658
Authors: Daniel S. Hamermesh; Gerard A. Pfann
Abstract: Using Dutch time-diary data from 1975-2005 covering over 10,000 respondents for 7 consecutive days each, we show that individuals’ sleep time exhibits both variability and volatility characterized by stationary autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity: The absolute values of deviations from a person’s average sleep on one day are positively correlated with those on the next day. Sleep is more variable on weekends and among people with less education, who are younger and who do not have young children at home. Volatility is greater among parents with young children, slightly greater among men than women, but independent of other demographics. A theory of economic incentives to minimize the dispersion of sleep predicts that higher-wage workers will exhibit less dispersion, a result demonstrated using extraneous estimates of earnings equations to impute wage rates. Volatility in sleep spills over onto volatility in other personal activities, with no reverse causation onto sleep. The results illustrate a novel dimension of economic inequality and could be applied to a wide variety of human behavior and biological processes.
Keywords: sleep variability; sleep volatility; economic inequality; time use; ARCH
JEL Codes: C22; I14; J22
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| previous sleep patterns (J22) | current sleep variability (C32) |
| demographic factors (J11) | sleep variability (J22) |
| economic incentives (M52) | sleep dispersion (J22) |
| sleep volatility (J22) | volatility in other personal activities (D14) |
| parents with young children (J13) | sleep volatility (J22) |
| men (Y70) | sleep volatility (J22) |
| younger individuals (J14) | sleep variability (J22) |
| individuals without young children (J13) | sleep variability (J22) |