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.
• We find a decreasing effect of per capita income on suicide in nine countries.
• An increasing impact of divorce rates on suicide is also evident in nine countries.
• Evidence on the impacts of fertility and alcohol consumption is relatively less.

Suicide causes huge economic losses, and the study of suicide from a socio-economic perspective is indispensable. This paper examines the factors affecting suicide in 13 European Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. We use the autoregressive distributed lag approach to cointegration as our estimation methodology. Our results reveal an increasing impact of divorce rates and a decreasing effect of per capita real gross domestic product on suicide rates in nine countries. However, evidence on the effects of fertility rates and per capita alcohol consumption is relatively less. For fertility rates, the results indicate that an increase leads to a decrease in suicide rates in four countries and a rise in one country. As for per capita alcohol consumption, we confirm evidence of a significant increasing effect on suicide rates in only three countries. In addition, the cumulative sum and cumulative sum of squares of recursive residuals tests results provide evidence of the stability of the estimated model.