Parental sleep and employment: evidence from a British cohort study

Joan Costa-Font and Sarah Flèche

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We show that sleep deprivation exerts a strong negative effect on labour market performance. We exploit variations in child sleep quality to instrument for parental sleep quality. A one-hour reduction in sleep duration significantly decreases labour force participation, the number of hour’s worked and household income. In addition, we find that low-skilled mothers are more likely to opt out of the labour market and work less hours than high-skilled mothers when exposed to sleep deprivation. We argue that sleep is a major determinant of employment outcomes that needs more attention in designing economic models of time allocation and employment policies.

Keywords: child sleep; sleep; maternal employment; working hours; job satisfaction; ALSPAC (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I18 J13 J22 J28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2017-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/69530/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Parental sleep and employment: evidence from a British cohort study (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:69530

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