Unemployment, global economic crises and suicides: evidence from 21 OECD countries

ABSTRACT

This study explores age- and gender-specific suicide mortality due to unemployment and economic crises, for 21 OECD countries over the period 1960 to 2011. The findings indicate that a higher unemployment rate leads to an increase in suicides in almost all age groups. Further, using dataset on economic/financial crisis events, results show that, in general, these crises increase suicide rates. However, the evidence also shows that economic crises have no effect on those in the 45 to 64 years age group in terms of suicides. Further, we assessed whether suicide mortality can be attributed to a ‘crisis effect’ beyond that of unemployment. For males, we found a significant joint effect between crises and unemployment. Finally, we investigated the possible nonlinear threshold response of suicides to unemployment. We found that suicides among young males (<45 years) are due to marked increases in unemployment in association with global economic crises.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic crises
• suicide mortality
• panel data
• unemployment
• threshold model

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C33
• E24
• G01
• I10

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation [00150254 to S.H.]. We thank participants of the XXXVX Annual Meeting of the Finnish Economic Association in Jyväskylä, Finland, and the European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society 2017, in Barcelona, Spain for their constructive comments. Huikari thanks the Finnish Cultural Foundation (personal grant #00150254) for its financial support.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ see also Durkheim (1897)

² The crises data set is continuously updated and it is freely downloadable from the web page reinhartandrogoff.com/data.

³ The banking, currency, default (domestic and external), inflation, and stock market crash composite index can take a value between 0 and 6 (for any country in any given year), depending on the number of crises occurring in a particular year. For instance, when a country experiences currency, stock market and banking crises simultaneously, the index gets a value 3.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation [00150254].