IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ags/jrapmc/339972.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Counties with More Vietnam Veterans Have Higher Suicide Rates

Author

Listed:
  • Roach, Travis
  • Nath, Saheli

Abstract

Despite a deep concern from policymakers and the public alike, detailed records linking military service records and suicide do not exist on a national scale. Here, we determine how suicide rates are related to the veteran population by linking data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) at the county-level with estimates of veteran populations by service period from the American Community Survey. While this is an indirect approach, this panel analysis allows us to uncover a robust and persistent finding: counties with larger Vietnam veteran populations have higher suicide rates. Our modeling strategy includes standard panel data methodology, sub-state analysis based on the adoption of Child Access Prevention laws governing firearms, and a recent innovation in instrumental variables methodology coupled with county birth records from lottery years as an instrument. Ultimately, we find that a standard deviation increase in the Vietnam veteran population is associated with 1.9 to 6 additional suicides per 100,000 people.

Suggested Citation

  • Roach, Travis & Nath, Saheli, 2023. "Counties with More Vietnam Veterans Have Higher Suicide Rates," Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy, Mid-Continent Regional Science Association, vol. 53(1), April.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:jrapmc:339972
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.339972
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/339972/files/Roach.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.339972?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Health Economics and Policy;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:jrapmc:339972. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/mcrsaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.