Economic hardship and suicides
: Matti Viren, Marko Korhonen, Mikko Puhakka
Publisher: Aboa Centre for Economics
: Turku
: 2015
: Aboa Centre for Economics, Discussion Papers
: 105
: http://www.ace-economics.fi/index.php?pageid=10⟨=en
We investigate the determinants of aggregate suicides in 15 OECD countries
during 1960 – 2010 using an economic model where changes in
welfare constitute the propagation mechanism for suicide. In the model
we assume that agents have habits in terms of their (level of) consumption.
The relationship between actual consumption to this level of habit
consumption provides us a hardship index which is the key variable in
the empirical application. In this application, we compute the index for
all sample countries and test whether we can predict changes in suicide
with this index. The performance of this index is remarkably good. In
practical terms, this means that at least some fraction of suicides is related
to the well-being of individual agents. This is certainly consistent
with most of the earlier research results. The novelty of our paper is,
however, that we can explain changes in suicide with this single index
that corresponds to a basic economic decision rule. Moreover, the results
are strikingly robust in terms of the various control variables that
have been suggested or used in previous empirical analyses.