To be or not to be: an economic shock, stress and suicidal ideation

Abstract

The probit estimation using a large individual data set associated with the Korean economic crisis in 1997 shows that the suicidal ideation demonstrates strong response to economic crisis, depression and stress. The elasticity of income on suicide risk is greater for males than females and greater for youths and adults than olds.

The Economics of Suicide in South Africa

“…Based on the Hamermesh and Soss () model specified in equation and in line with Noh (), d i is stated as the individual's value of death, where d i ∼ N ( μ , σ 2 ). The likelihood of suicide can be written as: where Z refers to the present value of individual lifetime utility, and Φ(·) is the cumulative normal distribution function.…”

“…Based on the literature and available data, the control variables included are age (Hamermesh and Soss, 1974;Cutler et al, 2001;Steen and Mayer, 2003), gender (Chuang and Huang, 1997;Hintikka et al, 1999;Jungeilges and Kirchgässner, 2002;Granados, 2008), education (Helliwell, 2007;Tekin and Markowitz, 2008;Noh, 2009b), marital status (Chuang and Huang, 1997), the month the suicide was committed (Massing and Angermeyer, 1985;Flisher et al, 1997;Rocchi et al, 2007) and the province of residence of the individual Burrows and Laflamme, 2006). 3 The inflation rate employed is a proxy for economic performance in each province.…”

“…3 These variables are by no means exhaustive. For example, suicides have also been found to be influenced by factors such as unemployment (Hintikka et al, 1999;Ruhm, 2000;Koo and Cox, 2008;Noh, 2009a;Kuroki, 2010;Yamamura, 2010), alcohol consumption (Pridemore, 2006;Koo and Cox, 2008), the fertility rate (Chuang and Huang, 1997;Yamamura, 2010), female labour force participation (Huang, 1996;Chuang and Huang, 1997), migration (Chuang and Huang, 1997), depression (Rutz, 2001;Schlebusch, 2005), contagion (Cutler et al, 2001), religion (Huang, 1996), civil liberty (Jungeilges and Kirchgässner, 2002) and urbanisation (Viren, 2005;Helliwell, 2007;Altinanahtar and Halicioglu, 2009). One factor that would be particularly interesting in the South African case, moreover, is the racial differences in suicide dynamics (Burrows et al, 2007).…”

“…In previous studies on the economics of suicide, the specific estimation model employed depended largely on the structure and quality of the data available. Studies typically make use of fixed or random-effects models for panel data (Lin, 2006;Noh, 2009a), co-integration techniques for time series data (Viren, 2005;Altinanahtar and Halicioglu, 2009) and OLS for pooled cross-sections or time series data (Chuang and Huang, 1997;Viren, 1999;Pridemore, 2006). Since the data used in this study comprise only completed suicides, construction of a panel of individuals is not possible.…”

“…With respect to suicide being pro-cyclical, suicide may increase during economic upswings due to greater alcohol consumption, less leisure time and greater work-related stress because of longer working hours (Ruhm, 2000;Pridemore, 2006). Durkheim (1897) emphasised the importance of social integration and social regulation as exacerbating suicide given that, during economic upswings, people become less socially integrated and are thus more likely to commit suicide (Chuang and Huang, 1997;Noh, 2009a). Another possible reason why suicides could increase during times of economic prosperity is that an increase in income may actually make some people less happy, especially if an individual's perceived level of social status or relative income is lower than that of others (Easterlin, 1974(Easterlin, , 1995Jungeilges and Kirchgässner, 2002;Daly and Wilson, 2009;Posel and Casale, 2011).…”