Earlier this month, you got to sleep in an additional hour. That hour felt terrific, though you weren’t awake to realize it. While many people enjoy daylight savings this time of year, and dislike it intensely during the spring, the presumption may be that there is little economic impact.
But a report from the JPMorgan Chase Institute indicates that there are economic consequences. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the new report indicates that U.S. consumer habits are impacted by sunlight.
There is a reduction in spending when much of the nation falls back to shift daylight an hour earlier, as occurred earlier this month. That reduction in spending is larger than the boost in spending that occurs in the spring.
To generate this conclusion, the study pulls from three hundred and eighty million credit and debit card transactions among two point five million anonymized Chase customers in Los Angeles and Phoenix. Arizona doesn’t observe daylight saving time, allowing it to serve as a baseline.
The study found a nearly one percent increase in daily card spending per capita is Los Angeles relative to Phoenix at the beginning of daylight saving time, but a nearly four percent decrease at the end of the period.
