The happiness - suicide paradox

Mary Daly, Andrew Oswald, Daniel Wilson and Stephen Wu

No 2010-30, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Abstract: Suicide is an important scientific phenomenon. Yet its causes remain poorly understood. This study documents a paradox: the happiest places have the highest suicide rates. The study combines findings from two large and rich individual-level data sets?one on life satisfaction and another on suicide deaths?to establish the paradox in a consistent way across U.S. states. It replicates the finding in data on Western industrialized nations and checks that the paradox is not an artifact of population composition or confounding factors. The study concludes with the conjecture that people may find it particularly painful to be unhappy in a happy place, so that the decision to commit suicide is influenced by relative comparisons.

Keywords: Happiness; Suicide (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/files/wp10-30bk.pdf Full text (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:fip:fedfwp:2010-30

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Research Library ().