Cristián Jara, Francisca Pérez, Rodrigo Wagner, Sleep hours fall as income rises: Macro and micro evidence on sleep inequality around the world, Economics & Human Biology, 2025, 101496, ISSN 1570-677X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2025.101496.
Highlights
- This paper examines global patterns of sleep inequality.
- Full-time, prime-age male workers in the top income quartile sleep around half an hour less per day than those in the lowest quartile.
- At the macro level, average sleep duration decreases as a country’s GDP increases.
- Higher-income individuals allocate more time to other leisure activities, such as social outings and internet usage, substituting sleep.
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
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H/t Tyler Cowen.
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