Suicide and the macroeconomy

The current macroeconomic and financial crisis provides quite a natural experiment, much as the oil crisis on the early 1970s did for an older generation. The data will generate many papers in the years to come. One grim aspect to this is that it sheds some light on the macroeconomic determinants of suicide. Brendan & Dermot Walsh have looked at this in the Irish case in a paper published in the Economic and Social Review.
A newspaper article today suggests there has been a recent spike in suicide in Greece. This isn't a scholarly study but then with pressing issues like this, one can't wait for the research to occur before addressing the public policy issues.

Suicide in Ireland: The Influence of Alcohol and Unemployment

Brendan Walsh, Dermot Walsh
In this paper we model the behaviour of the Irish suicide rate over the period 1968‐2009 using the unemployment rate and the level of alcohol consumption as explanatory variables. It is found that these variables have significant positive effects on suicide mortality in several demographic groups. Alcohol consumption is a significant influence on the male suicide rate up to age 64. Its influence on the female suicide rate is not as well‐established, although there is evidence that it is important in the 15‐24 and 25‐34 age groups. The unemployment rate is also a significant influence on the male suicide rate in the younger age groups. The behaviour of suicide rates among males aged 55 and over and females aged 25 and over is largely unaccounted for by our model. These broad conclusions hold when account is taken of a structural break in the 1980s, with the response to unemployment being greater in the earlier period and that to alcohol greater in the later period. The findings suggest that higher alcohol consumption played a major role in the increase in suicide mortality among young Irish males between the late 1960s and the end of the century. In the early twenty first century a combination of falling alcohol consumption and low unemployment led to a marked reduction in suicide rates, although there is some evidence that the suicide rate is being increasingly under‐reported in recent years. The recent rise in the suicide rate may be attributed to the sharp increase in unemployment, especially among males, but it has been moderated by the continuing fall in alcohol consumption. Some policy implications of the findings are discussed.

Suicide and employment status during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy

A recent publication in the European Journal of Public Health might be of interest to you. This research examines CSO data from 1996 to 2006 and finds that unemployment status is associated with a two to three-fold increased risk of suicide for men and a four to six-fold increased risk for women. This research also indicates that the highest male suicide rate was in the 15-34-year-olds, and unemployment was the stronger risk factor for suicide in men aged 35-54.

Ireland Suicide Report

The pdf of the report referred to by Kevin is below. It contains very valuable information on time trends, age composition, methods of suicide and related information. Looking at the basic time series of suicide should give people making exaggerated claims about the likely impact of the recession on suicide some pause for thought. Certainly, risk factors for some groups will be increasing and in particular cases alarmingly so. But in general, the evidence on gdp and suicide is very mixed as can at least partly be seen by the fact that suicides were so high during the Irish economic boom.

link here

Suicide trends

This story from RTE provides welcome news that the suicide rate has fallen. It contains the following remark "Today's report shows a continued reduction in suicides each year since 2003. However, it says it is still too early to say whether this trend is significant." But why so hesitant:why is it too early to say? If they mean significance in the normal sense of the word, then the only thing that matters is the size of the effect, surely?
If they mean statistical significance, I am not sure that makes sense either: we are talking about changes in a population parameter here so statistical inference doesn't come into it? That is, if the rate falls then it falls, end of story. I suppose this is related to the hoary old question of what t statistics mean when your data is the population & not a sample.
Actually the news is even better: as the article notes "Given the population growth, the rate of suicide is now the lowest since 1993, when suicide was decriminalised".

http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0902/suicide.html

Unemployment & suicide

Another paper on the macro determinants of suicide:

Does unemployment increase suicide rates? The OECD panel evidence

Yong-Hwan Noh

Previous studies of whether unemployment increases suicide rates give mixed results. None of them controlled for an interaction between unemployment and income. This paper tests the hypothesis whether the relationship between unemployment rates and suicide rates vary according to the level of real per capita GDP. We use the cross-country panel fixed effects approach to exclude cross-sectional variations but exploit time-series ones. We support that higher income is associated with higher suicide rates. In particular, the evidence shows that the implied effect of unemployment on suicide rates is positive for countries with higher income. Actually, for countries with lower-income levels, there is a negative impact of unemployment on suicides.

Journal of Economic Psychology 30(4), August 2009, 575-582

Suicide and Well-Being

Mary Daly and Daniel Wilson have written a number of papers about the economics of suicide. If you look at Figure 1 in their paper below "Happiness, Unhappiness and suicide: An empirical assessment" it confirms the idea that time trends in suicide and overall well-being are apparently unconnected. I have talked about this in several seminars for Ireland and have raised it as a puzzle but am frequently told that this is unsurprising. The paper below finds that the determinants of suicide at the micro level are very similar to the determinants of well-being and thus, they argue that suicide should still be viewed as a strong measure of utility. I am still curious though as to why this relationship does not hold at time series level.

paper link

Galway Seminar on Suicide

SEMINAR Speaker: Professor Antonio Rodriquez, Universidad de Castilla La Mancha, Spain. Title: Socioeconomic differences in suicide risk among adult persons between 18 to 65 years old in Denmark: A population based longitudinal study.

2.00 - 4.00 Friday 19th September, 2008.
Lecture Hall 1, St. Anthony's


http://www.economics.nuig.ie/resrch/event.php?eid=123

There is no Easterlin Paradox!

The Easterlin Paradox is fundamental to the argument that focusing on material well-being does not promote overall well-being beyond a certain point. A new NBER paper argues that the Easterlin paradox simply does not hold. Richer countries are happier even at very high levels of income. We have been looking a lot at this in Ireland and, in general, well-being did decrease during the 1980's economic downturn. The data from 1994-2001 (during the height of the boom) do not show much increase in GHQ-12 measures but there were certainly increases in things like financial satisfaction (e.g. see an early version of a forthcoming paper we did on the topic below). In short, Ireland provides reasonable evidence for what Stevenson and Wolfers are saying though the dramatic increase in suicide during the economic boom is very difficult to explain from the point of view that income increases make people happier.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w14282

http://ideas.repec.org/p/ucd/wpaper/200609.html


Betsey Stevenson, Justin Wolfers

NBER Working Paper No. 14282
Issued in August 2008
NBER Program(s): EFG LS ME


---- Abstract -----

The "Easterlin paradox" suggests that there is no link between a society's economic development and its average level of happiness. We re-assess this paradox analyzing multiple rich datasets spanning many decades. Using recent data on a broader array of countries, we establish a clear positive link between average levels of subjective well-being and GDP per capita across countries, and find no evidence of a satiation point beyond which wealthier countries have no further increases in subjective well-being. We show that the estimated relationship is consistent across many datasets and is similar to the relationship between subject well-being and income observed within countries. Finally, examining the relationship between changes in subjective well-being and income over time within countries we find economic growth associated with rising happiness. Together these findings indicate a clear role for absolute income and a more limited role for relative income comparisons in determining happiness.