Spillover effects of minimum wages on suicide mortality: Evidence from Japan

Yuji Mizushima () and Haruko Noguchi
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Yuji Mizushima: Graduate School of Economics, Waseda University, 1-104 Totsukamachi, Shinjuku, Tokyo, 169-8050, Japan

No 2105, Working Papers from Waseda University, Faculty of Political Science and Economics

Abstract: This study examines the spillover effects of minimum wages on suicide mortality in Japan using vital statistics data from 2000 to 2016. The possibility of competing income and unemployment effects motivates our research question as an empirical one. Our difference-in-differences regression framework exploits a minimum wage policy reform in Japan that was implemented in 2008, which mandated prefectures to incrementally increase their minimum wages to local living wages. The revision contributed to a decrease in male suicides by 4.58% that is concentrated among age groups with greater exposure to minimum wages. A supplementary analysis of the Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions (2004-2016) suggests that increases in earned income in the absence of sizable adverse effects on labor at the intensive and extensive margins among low-wage earners could be an important mechanism driving these results.

Keywords: Well-being; Suicide; Minimum wage; Living wage; Japan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2021-04
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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