Schilbach, a development economist, says the genesis of the study came from other research he and his colleagues have done in settings such as Chennai - during which they have observed that low-income people tend to have difficult sleeping circumstances in addition to their other daily challenges. The authors of the paper are Pedro Bessone PhD ’21, a recent graduate from MIT’s Department of Economics Gautam Rao, an associate professor of economics at Harvard University Schilbach, who is the Gary Loveman Career Development Associate Professor of Economics at MIT Heather Schofield, an assistant professor in the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Mattie Toma, a PhD candidate in economics at Harvard University. The paper, “The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor,” is published in the August issue of The Quarterly Journal of Economics. “People’s sleep quality is so low in these circumstances in Chennai that adding sleep of poor quality may not have the benefits that another half hour of sleep would have if it’s of higher quality,” Schilbach suggests. The findings leave open the possibility that helping people sleep more soundly, rather than just adding to their total amount of low-grade sleep, could be useful. For another thing, participants tended to sleep at night in difficult circumstances, with many interruptions. There is more to the matter: For one thing, the researchers found, short daytime naps do help productivity and well-being. “To our surprise, these night-sleep interventions had no positive effects whatsoever on any of the outcomes we measured,” says Frank Schilbach, an MIT economist and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s findings. The only thing it did, apparently, was to lower the number of hours they worked. And yet, sleeping more at night did not improve people’s work productivity, earnings, financial choices, sense of well-being, or even their blood pressure. The study is based on a distinctive field experiment of low-income workers in Chennai, India, where the researchers studied residents at home during their normal everyday routines - and managed to increase participants’ sleep by about half an hour per night, a very substantial gain. But a new study co-authored by MIT economists complicates this picture, suggesting that more sleep, by itself, isn’t necessarily sufficient to bring about those kinds of appealing improvements. Subjectively, getting more sleep seems to provide big benefits: Many people find it gives them increased energy, emotional control, and an improved sense of well-being.
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