Behavior seminar

Du 21/03/2019 de 11:00 à 12:00

Salle R2-21, campus Jourdan - 75014 Paris

SCHOFIELD Heather (The University of Pennsylvania)

Sleepless in Chennai: The Consequences of Improving Sleep among the Urban Poor

Sleep deprivation is common around the world. While sleep medicine has established that inducing acute sleep deprivation substantially worsens cognition, we know little about the real-world impacts of improving sleep. We hire 450 individuals in urban India as data-entry workers and offer a random subset different interventions to increase their sleep: (i) devices to improve their home-sleep environment, (ii) additional financial incentives to increase sleep, and (iii) the opportunity to take a short nap in the afternoon. We present three sets of results. First, the interventions increase night sleep duration by 20 to 40 minutes (on a base of 5.5 hours per night in the control group) with no detectable changes in sleep efficiency. Individuals assigned to the nap treatment sleep on average about 12 minutes during their naps. Second, contrary to predictions by most sleep experts and economists, improved night sleep lowers labor supply slightly (6.5 minutes) and does not significantly improve productivity or earnings. In contrast, naps increase productivity by about 2-3 percent, although the increase is insufficient to fully counteract the associated reduction in labor supply relative to working through that time. Third, increased night sleep improves health as measured by a composite health index by 0.1 units, and naps improve an index of well-being by a similar amount. Taken together, we find little evidence of increased sleep causing impacts on short- and medium-run economic outcomes that could be easily discernible by individuals, thus providing a possible explanation for the persistence of widespread sleep deprivation found in many settings.