The ‘Trendiness’ of Sleep: An Empirical Investigation into the Cyclical Nature of Sleep Time

Pierre Brochu, Catherine Deri Armstrong and Louis-Philippe Morin

No 0909E, Working Papers from University of Ottawa, Department of Economics

Abstract: Using Canadian time use data, we exploit exogenous variation in local unemployment rates to investigate the cyclical nature of sleep time and show that for both men and women, sleep time decreases when the economy is doing relatively better. Our results suggest that in a recession Canadians sleep an average of 2 hours and 34 minutes more per week, or 22 minutes more per day. Given the importance of even small changes in sleep time on measures of cognitive functioning such as reaction time and concentration, our findings may help explain the countercyclical nature of mortality. Further, as we find that sleep is affected by the same economic variables (notably the unemployment rate) that affect market work time, our results also contribute to the limited literature that shows that sleep time should not be treated as exogenously determined, but, like any other resource, determined by its relative cost.

Keywords: Business Cycles; Sleep. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://sciencessociales.uottawa.ca/economics/sites ... mics/files/0909E.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 502 Bad Gateway (http://sciencessociales.uottawa.ca/economics/sites/socialsciences.uottawa.ca.economics/files/0909E.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://sciencessociales.uottawa.ca/economics/sites/socialsciences.uottawa.ca.economics/files/0909E.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The ‘trendiness’ of sleep: an empirical investigation into the cyclical nature of sleep time (2012)
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:ott:wpaper:0909e

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Ottawa, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Aggey Semenov ().