Opposite Nonlinear Effects of Unemployment and Sentiment on Male and Female Suicide Rates: Evidence from Australia

This paper investigates whether there are gender differences in the effects of unemployment and sentiment on suicide rates. We apply linear and nonlinear auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) models to monthly Australian data from February 1990 to September 2018. As expected, we find a positive relationship between the unemployment rate and suicide rate, and a negative relationship between consumer sentiment and the suicide rate. However, there is strong evidence of nonlinearity in the effects of both unemployment and sentiment on suicide rates, with substantial gender differences. For men, an increase in the unemployment rate significantly increases the suicide rate, but an unemployment decrease has no effect; we find the opposite for women. For men, an increase in sentiment tends to have stronger effects on the suicide rate than a decrease in sentiment. Again, we observe the opposite effect for women. Among components of sentiment, forward-looking expectations are stronger predictors of suicide rates than components relating to present conditions. We also find that sentiment has a much stronger effect on male suicide rates than on female suicide rates.