Liberalizing reforms do not cause suicide: Causal estimation using matching, 1980–2019

Tibor Rutar and Minea Rutar

Journal of Comparative Economics, 2025, vol. 53, issue 1, 272-289

Abstract: The impact of market liberalization on the subjective well-being (SWB) of societies has been thoroughly investigated over the past two decades using indexes of economic freedom. However, one crucial related aspect of well-being at the societal level remains unexplored with aggregate measures of liberalization: rates of suicide. The critical literature on liberalization suggests market reforms are expected to boost suicide. To our knowledge, we are the first to explore the issue using the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) measure in a quasi-experimental framework. We do so by identifying 43 countries experiencing large, sustained jumps in economic freedom. We then use matching methods to obtain the average treatment effect in the 10 years following the jump. Our main finding, which is robust to a variety of alternative specifications, including a different estimator (synthetic difference-in-differences), is that we detect virtually no statistically significant positive effect of aggregate liberalization on suicide at the conventional level. Thus, we are unable to corroborate the critics’ prediction about reforms worsening this aspect of psychological well-being. We find evidence that individual reform packages, such as sound money, instead even work protectively.

Keywords: Causal inference; Economic freedom; Market liberalization; Matching; Mental health; Neoliberalism; Suicide; Well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 P1 P14 P5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147596725000034
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jcecon:v:53:y:2025:i:1:p:272-289

DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2025.01.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Comparative Economics is currently edited by D. Berkowitz and G. Roland

More articles in Journal of Comparative Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().