 The variability and volatility of sleep: An ARCHetypal behaviorDaniel Hamermesh and Gerard Pfann Economics & Human Biology, 2022, vol. 47, issue C Abstract: Using 1975–2005 Dutch time-diary data covering over 10,000 respondents for 7 consecutive days each, we show that sleep time exhibits non-constant variability, or 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 adjacent days. Sleep is more variable on weekends and among younger people, those without young children, or with less education. Volatility is greater among parents with young children, slightly greater among men, but independent of other demographics. Economic incentives to minimize the dispersion of sleep imply higher-wage workers will exhibit less dispersion, which we observe. Sleep volatility spills over onto volatility in other personal activities, with no reverse causation onto sleep. The results illustrate a novel dimension of inequality among people and could be applied to a wide variety of human behavior and biological processes. Keywords: Time use; ARCH; Economic incentives in biological processes; Volatility (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:47:y:2022:i:c:s1570677x22000715 DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2022.101175 Access Statistics for this article Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier |
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