Osea Giuntella is an associate professor who joined the University of Pittsburgh in 2016 after a post-doc at the University of Oxford and a PhD at Boston University. He is interested in health behaviors, the economics of immigration, and labor economics. His work is highly interdisciplinary and he has collaborated with behavioral scientists, psychologists, anthropologists, and demographers. Some of his recent work has focused on the economics of sleep. Sleep is increasingly recognized as a public health challenge with growing evidence of the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation on health, human capital, decision making, and productivity. In fact, several firms, sport teams, and military training programs include now sleep health as one of their pillars.
In a recent study (forthcoming in the Review of Economics and Statistics) with Mallory Avery, a former PhD student at Pitt who is now a post-doc at Monash Unviersity, and Peiran Jiao (associate professor at Maastricht University) they investigate sleep choice and the role of monetary incentives and commitment devices to promote healthier sleep habits among college students at a major public US university. They collected data from wearable activity trackers, surveys, and time-use diaries and randomized monetary incentives to go to bed earlier and sleep longer. Monetary incentives significantly increased sleep duration. Students who received the incentive to sleep longer were 13% more likely to sleep between 7 and 9 hours and 16% less likely to sleep less than 6 hours. Even after the financial incentive was removed, treated participants were still 9% more likely to sleep between 7 and 9 hours, suggesting the effects of the incentives may persist, at least for some weeks. Students opted for commitment devices in the form of stricter bedtime and sleep duration targets, potentially renouncing monetary gains. The fact the individuals sleep less than recommended, with many of them systematically regretting bedtime in choice the morning after, and despite the daily experience and feedback with this time-inconsistency, makes sleep an interesting domain to study self-control problems and interventions that may help individuals shaping healthier habits. Their results suggest that interventions based only on the provision of information may not be particularly effective, while incentives and commitment devices may promote better sleep behaviors among subjects with self-control problems. Interventions that help individuals forming routines (i.e. reduced screen time) may have longer-lasting effects.
Osea enjoys working with PhD students and much of his current work is coauthored with current or former Pitt students. “It keeps you excited and motivated to work with young, bright and diverse minds. Nothing is more gratifying than seeing young PhD students growing up as independent scholars.”