title: Economic hardship and suicide mortality in Finland, 1875-2010.
abstract: We investigate the determinants of suicide in Finland using annual data for consumption and suicides from 1860 to 2010. Instead of using some ad hoc measures of cyclical movements of the economy, we build our analysis on a more solid economic theory. A key feature is the habit persistence in preferences, which provides a way to measure individual well-being and predict suicide. We estimate time series of habit levels and develop an indicator (the hardship index) to describe the economic hardship of consumers. The higher the level of the index, the worse off consumers are. As a rational response to such a bad situation, some consumers might commit suicide. We employ the autoregressive distributed lags cointegration method and find that our index works well in explaining the long-term behavior of people committing suicide in Finland.
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, University of Oulu, P.O. Box 4600, 90014, Oulu, Finland. marko.korhonen@Oulu.fi.
authors.forename: Marko
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Korhonen
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, University of Oulu, P.O. Box 4600, 90014, Oulu, Finland. mikko.puhakka@Oulu.fi.
authors.forename: Mikko
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Puhakka
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics and the Public Choice Research Centre, University of Turku, 20014, Turku, Finland. matvir@utu.fi.|Bank of Finland, P.O. Box 160, 00101, Helsinki, Finland. matvir@utu.fi.
authors.forename: Matti
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Viren
mesh_terms: D004467:Economics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005387:Finland / Q000453:epidemiology; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D013405:Suicide / Q000191:economics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*
keywords: Cointegration; Habit persistence; Hall’s consumption function; Suicide