Economic Correlates of Suicide

A very recent working Paper of KOF Swiss Economic Institute investigates how economic conditions are associated with age-sex group specific suicide rates in a panel of 28 OECD countries over the period 1980-2002. They consider the trend and cyclical components of income, unemployment, income inequality, inflation, as well as various socio-demographic control variables. 

Estimating models in first diferences, and noting that their results depend on whether stationarity properties are adequately accommodated or not, they find that the cyclical component of income is negatively associated with suicide rates of men, while unemployment primarily affects suicide rates of women. Moreover, their estimations show that the effects of the cyclical component of income and unemployment are most pronounced in OECD countries with low public social security spending.

 

The paper can be found @ http://www.kof.ethz.ch/publications/science/pdf/wp_207.pdf