Abstract
A risk of income fluctuations has two opposite impacts on the decision-making of those who contemplate suicide due to economic difficulties. First, an increase in this risk makes risk-averse people more likely to commit suicide by reducing their expected utility. Second, the increased risk makes them less likely to commit suicide by creating a value to waiting for their economic environment to improve. Standard models typically ignore the latter of the two impacts, however. In this paper, I allow the agents in the model to delay the action of committing suicide. From a series of simulations, I derive four conclusions. First, it is misleading to ignore the agents’ ability to wait when they are endowed with no debts. Second, the young who are endowed with no debts may choose to stay alive only to commit suicide in near future when their income is at high risk of fluctuations. Third, the young who are endowed with debts cannot utilise the ability to wait at all. Fourth, the divorced, ceteris paribus, are more likely to commit suicide than the married.
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Acknowledgments
This research is supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). The grant number is 23530345. I would like to thank an anonymous referee and participants of conferences, where this paper was presented at various stages, for constructive comments. Remaining errors are my responsibility.
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Suzuki, T. How will a risk of income fluctuations influence the suicidal decision making? Insights from a three-period model of suicide. Eurasian Econ Rev 5, 331–343 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40822-015-0022-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40822-015-0022-9