Economics Never Sleeps

At the NY Times' Economix blog, Catherine Rampell reports survey results showing that economists are America's fifth most sleep deprived category of workers.

Most Sleep-Deprived
6h57m	Home Health Aides
7h	Lawyer
7h1m	Police Officers
7h2m	Physicians, Paramedics
7h3m	Economists

She seems puzzled by this:

Personally, I would love to know why economists are on this list. Economists in academia, at least,  seem to have flexible schedules that should let them get lots of sleep. Maybe a lot of them are grad students scrambling to publish, publish, publish. Or maybe there are a lot of folks like Larry Summers who prefer allocating more hours for work.

I've never met Larry Summers, but, based on what I've read, I don't think there are a lot of folks like him. 

But the "scrambling to publish, publish, publish" certainly doesn't end in grad school - indeed, that's only the beginning of it.  I really like being an academic, but its not quite so cushy as people seem to think.  However, I'm not sure why that would be worse for economists than other academics - if anything, it should be better for us because our job market is better than in most disciplines.  But it does seem to be the case that economists are disproportionately represented among the faculty I see around the building late at night or on the weekends.  Perhaps economists face a lower opportunity cost of working (i.e., we have lousy social lives).

Or maybe we just love what we do!

However, there doesn't seem to be much variance among occupations.  The least sleep-deprived group is "forest, logging workers" who get 7 hours and 20 minutes of sleep -  that's only about 3 percent more than economists.  As an economist, I wonder if that's a statistically significant difference.