Does Daylight Saving Time Really Make Us Sick?

Lawrence Jin and Nicolas Ziebarth ()

No 9088, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper comprehensively studies the health effects of Daylight Saving Time (DST) regulation. Relying on up to 3.4 million BRFSS respondents from the US and the universe of 160 million hospital admissions from Germany over one decade, we do not find much evidence that population health significantly decreases when clocks are set forth by one hour in spring. However, when clocks are set back by one hour in fall, effectively extending sleep duration for the sleep deprived by one hour, population health slightly improves for about four days. The most likely explanation for the asymmetric effects are behavioral adjustments by marginal people in spring.

Keywords: Daylight Saving Time (DST); BRFSS; hospital admissions; sleep deprivation; Germany; US (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H41 I18 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 71 pages
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published - revised version published as 'Sleep, Health, and Human Capital: Evidence from Daylight Saving Time' in: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization , 2020,170, 174-192

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