LEAP Seminar: Heather Schofield, University of Pennsylvania
“Sleepless in Chennai: The Consequences of Improving Sleep among the Urban Poor"
Heather Schofield
ABSTRACT:
Sleep deprivation is common around the world. While sleep medicine has established that inducing acute sleep deprivation substantially worsens cognition, we know little about the real-world impacts of improving sleep. We hire 450 individuals in urban India as data-entry workers and offer a random subset different interventions to increase their sleep: (i) devices to improve their home-sleep environment, (ii) additional financial incentives to increase sleep, and (iii) the opportunity to take a short nap in the afternoon. We present three sets of results. First, the interventions increase night sleep duration by 20 to 40 minutes (on a base of 5.5 hours per night in the control group) with no detectable changes in sleep efficiency. Individuals assigned to the nap treatment sleep on average about 12 minutes during their naps. Second, contrary to predictions by most sleep experts and economists, improved night sleep lowers labor supply slightly (6.5 minutes) and does not significantly improve productivity or earnings. In contrast, naps increase productivity by about 2-3 percent. Third, increased night sleep improves health as measured by a composite health index by 0.1 units, and naps improve an index of well-being by a similar amount. Taken together, we find little evidence of increased sleep causing impacts on short- and medium-run economic outcomes that could be easily discernible by individuals, thus providing a possible explanation for the persistence of widespread sleep deprivation found in many settings.
SPEAKER:
Dr. Schofield is an economist at the University of Pennsylvania (Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School) studying development, health, and behavioral economics with a focus on the interaction between health, cognition, productivity, and decision-making. Her work seeks to understand the potentially bi-directional relationships between health, productivity, and decision-making – where not only do one’s decisions influence one’s health, but health itself may influence how productive one is in the labor market and how one makes decisions. In her research, she draws on my training in both development and behavioral economics as well as public health and utilizes a variety of methodologies including randomized trials, surveys (both longitudinal and cross-sectional), and secondary data analysis. Dr. Schofield completed her Ph.D. in Business Economics, MS in Global Health and Population, and BA in Economics at Harvard University.
For any enquiry, please write to leap@unibocconi.it