The association of COVID-19 employment shocks with suicide and safety net use: An early-stage investigation

Michihito Ando and Masato Furuichi

PLOS ONE, 2022, vol. 17, issue 3, 1-26

Abstract: This paper examines whether the COVID-19-induced employment shocks are associated with increases in suicides and safety net use in the second and third quarters of 2020. We exploit plausibly exogenous regional variation in the magnitude of the employment shocks in Japan and adopt a difference-in-differences research design to examine and control for possible confounders. Our preferred point estimates suggest that a one-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate in the second quarter of 2020 is associated with, approximately, an additional 0.52 suicides, 28 unemployment benefit recipients, 88 recipients of a temporary loan program, and 10 recipients of public assistance per 100,000 population per month. A simple calculation based on these estimates suggests that if a region experienced a one-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate caused by the COVID-19 crisis in the second quarter of 2020, which is roughly equivalent to the third-highest regional employment shock, this would be associated with 37.4%, 60.5%, and 26.5% increases in the total, female, and male suicide rates respectively in July 2020 compared with July 2019. These results are primarily correlational rather than causal due to the limitation of our data and research design, but our baseline findings are robust to several different model specifications.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0264829 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 64829&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0264829

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264829

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().