How will a risk of income fluctuations influence the suicidal decision making? Insights from a three-period model of suicide

Tomoya Suzuki ()

Eurasian Economic Review, 2015, vol. 5, issue 2, 343 pages

Abstract: A risk of income fluctuations has two opposite impacts on the decision-making of those who contemplate suicide due to economic difficulties. First, an increase in this risk makes risk-averse people more likely to commit suicide by reducing their expected utility. Second, the increased risk makes them less likely to commit suicide by creating a value to waiting for their economic environment to improve. Standard models typically ignore the latter of the two impacts, however. In this paper, I allow the agents in the model to delay the action of committing suicide. From a series of simulations, I derive four conclusions. First, it is misleading to ignore the agents’ ability to wait when they are endowed with no debts. Second, the young who are endowed with no debts may choose to stay alive only to commit suicide in near future when their income is at high risk of fluctuations. Third, the young who are endowed with debts cannot utilise the ability to wait at all. Fourth, the divorced, ceteris paribus, are more likely to commit suicide than the married. Copyright Eurasia Business and Economics Society 2015

Keywords: Suicide; Generational difference; Ability to delay action; Risk of income fluctuations; I120; I140; D190; D630 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s40822-015-0022-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurase:v:5:y:2015:i:2:p:331-343

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40822

DOI: 10.1007/s40822-015-0022-9

Access Statistics for this article

Eurasian Economic Review is currently edited by Dorothea Schäfer

More articles in Eurasian Economic Review from Springer, Eurasia Business and Economics Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().