Suicide and divorce in South Korea: focusing on types of divorce

ABSTRACT

Using a panel of province-level data in South Korea over the last two decades, this paper examines the effect of divorce on female and male suicide rates. By focusing on the types of divorce and the reasons for divorce, I find that a higher mutual-consent divorce rate is associated with a decrease in female suicide rate, whereas the judicial divorce rate is positively associated with male suicide rate. For the reasons for divorce, I find that an increase in divorce rate caused by unfaithful acts, a representative reason for judicial divorce, raises female suicide rate, while divorce rates caused by main reasons for mutual-consent divorce are negatively associated with female suicide rate.

KEYWORDS:

• Female suicide
• marital conflict
• mutual-consent divorce
• judicial divorce

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I12
• J12
• D74
• D10

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editor and anonymous referee for their valuable advice. I am also grateful to Jaesung Choi, Iljoong Kim, So Young Kim, Dongwon Lee, Sujin Min, and seminar participants at the Sungkyunkwan University meetings for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

¹ There are only six grounds for judicial divorce; these include an unchaste act, malicious desertion by another spouse, and extreme maltreatment. For more information on the Korean divorce law, see Lee (2013) and Lee (2020).

² Due to unavailability of data on reasons for divorce after 2018, I applied an extrapolation for years 2018 and 2019. Until the year 2017, the results are similar. The Annual Report on Vital Statistics, my divorce data, provides six causes for divorce: 1) unchaste act (Infidelity); 2) physical or emotional abuse (Abuse); 3) health problem (Health); 4) family discord (Discord); 5) financial problem (Financial); 6) personality clashes (Clash).