Parental sleep and employment: evidence from a British cohort study

Joan Costa-Font and Sarah Flèche

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

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 hours 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)
Date: 2017-02-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-lma and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1467.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Parental sleep and employment: evidence from a British cohort study (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1467

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (cep.info@lse.ac.uk).