 Sleep hours fall as income rises: Macro and micro evidence on sleep inequality around the worldCristián Jara, Francisca Pérez and Rodrigo Wagner Economics & Human Biology, 2025, vol. 58, issue C Abstract: People spend about a third of their lives sleeping. Our paper utilizes detailed time-use data to study sleep inequality by income. Our contribution lies in analyzing this relationship both within and across countries, using a global sample. At the micro level, we find that full-time male workers in the top income quartile sleep around half an hour less per day than those in the lowest quartile. This qualitative result is robust to various alternative tests and measurement of key variables. At the macro level, the average sleep hours decrease as the country’s GDP per capita increases. Interestingly, both our micro and macro estimations, are coherent with an estimated income elasticity of sleep around −0.04. Using this elasticity we replicate the implicit relationships identified in previous single-country studies. Additional results suggest that other leisure activities may be positively correlated to income, such as internet use and social outings, substituting sleep. Keywords: Sleep inequality; Time allocation; Multinational Time Use Study (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:58:y:2025:i:c:s1570677x25000292 DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2025.101496 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 |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.