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    • Therefore the empirical baseline model is as described by th

    2018-11-07

    Therefore, the empirical baseline model is as described by the following equation:where Suicide is one of the dependent variables ascribed and is a vector of controls, t accounts for the year, β, γ and α are p-Cresyl sulfate of parameters to estimate and u is the error term, assumed to be Gaussian white noise. The assumption regarding the distribution of the error term is standard in the literature.
    Empirical results In this section we present the OLS estimations of the model presented above. Table 2 presents the OLS estimation results for the baseline model described in the previous section and, hence, with GDP growth rate as the measure of output. Columns (1)–(3) show the results with total suicide rates (Stotal) as the dependent variable: (1) with no controls; (2) adds the marriage and the infant mortality growth rates; and (3) includes all the controls explained in the previous section. As controls are added both interaction terms stop being statistically different from zero at usual significance levels. Hence, changes in methodology do not lead to changes in the coefficient of interest. Final results are displayed in column (3) for the whole population, while columns (4) and (5) show the same reasoning for males (Smale) and females (Sfemale), respectively. The degree of statistical significance is signaled with asterisks and all models are estimated using robust standard errors. As exposed in the table above, the impact of GDP growth is negative and statistically significant for the whole population. This result seems to be driven by male׳s behavior. On average, when GDP growth increases by 10 percentage points (pp), suicides decrease by 18.07 out of 100.000 individuals, ceteris paribus. When the same analysis is performed just for males in column (4), the number of men affected is higher and closer to 31, on average.
    Discussion Despite a general concern that periods of crisis harmfully affect health outcomes, this idea was contested by a series of prominent papers by Ruhm (2000, 2003, 2005), Neumayer (2004) and Tapia-Granados (2005, 2008), who concluded that economic downturns are associated with lower total mortality rates. For instance, Ruhm (2000), using a panel sample of American states between 1972 and 1991, showed that recessions are associated with increased physical activity and reduced obesity and smoking. Hence, he found that unemployment rates are negatively and statistically significant related to total mortality in 8/10 of the specific causes of death that were considered. There was, however, an important exception to this pattern: the occurrence of suicides. More recently, numerous academic articles and commentaries have been published analyzing the impact of the financial crisis and the effects of fiscal responses on health systems in the US (Phillips & Nugent, 2014), Europe (Stuckler et al., 2013), England and Wales (Coope et al., 2014), Greece (Antonokakis & Collins, 2014), and Portugal (Augusto, 2012; Barros, 2012). Using data for five Eurozone peripheral countries (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain) over the 1968–2012 period, Antonakakis and Collins (in press) are responsible for the first systematic multiple-country evidence of a causal relationship of fiscal austerity on time, gender, and age-specific suicide mortality while controlling for various socioeconomic factors. These authors suggest that fiscal austerity had short-, medium- and long-run suicide increasing effects on the male population in the 65–89 age group. Our main findings corroborate the countercyclical theory, i.e. we document an inverse relation between two output measures and suicidal behavioral. Our results are also consistent with the economic theory of suicide developed by Hamermesh and Soss (1974). In this sense, one can infer that suicide rates and the economic cycle have a strong negative relation. Therefore, our methods suggest that there is both a short and medium term association among these two phenomena. In addition, we report a substantial gender differential in suicide behaviors that tends to be persistent even if we consider that major societal changes have occurred in Portugal, such as the rise in female labor force participation, the increasing prevalence of women in higher education institutions, and changes in family formation patterns (Santana et al., 2015). These differences found in our baseline regressions are corroborated by several micro level studies including Gerdtham and Johannesson (2005) who used a large individual level data set on more than 40,000 individuals in Sweden, followed for 10–16 years. In this paper, these researchers found a significant countercyclical pattern between the business cycle indicators and male cardiovascular mortality, cancer mortality and suicidal behavior. For women they were not able to reject the null hypothesis of no effect for any of the business cycle indicators.