Does unemployment increase suicide rates? The OECD panel evidence

Yong-Hwan Noh

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2009, vol. 30, issue 4, 575-582

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Suicide; Unemployment; Interaction; effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167-4870(09)00036-1
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:joepsy:v:30:y:2009:i:4:p:575-582

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read

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