A study on the socio-economic determinants of suicide: Evidence from 13 European OECD countries

This paper examines the factors affecting suicide in 13 European OECD countries from a socio-economic perspective. We use the autoregressive distributed lag approach to cointegration as the estimation methodology. Our results reveal that an increasing impact of divorce rates and a decreasing effect of per capita real GDP on suicide are confirmed in 9 countries. However, the evidence on the effects of fertility rates and per capita alcohol consumption are relatively less. For fertility rates, the results reveal that its increase leads to a decrease in suicide rates in four countries and a rise in suicide rates in one country. As for per capita alcohol consumption, the evidence supporting its significantly increasing effects on suicide rates is only confirmed in three countries. In addition, the tests of the cumulative sum and the cumulative sum of squares of the recursive residuals provide evidence indicating the stability of the estimated model.