Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Unexpected aspects of recessions

Today's Times has an article about how health might improve during economic bad times, something that Chris Ruhm at UNC-Greensboro has been writing about for about a decade. It sounds like an odd finding, but the idea is that unhealthy behavior like smoking and not exercising is associated with being very busy at work.

Some of my own recent work shows that patterns of time use in the U.S. since 2003 suggest that higher unemployment is associated with more and better-quality sleep, and with spending time taking care of adults.

See? The looming recession ain't all bad!