The remainder of the paper

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, a review of the literature on the topic is presented. In Section 3, our methodology is explained and some data considerations are added. In Section 4, results are displayed and reflections per gender are offered. Section 5 discusses our findings and recognizes some data limitations. Finally, Section 6 concludes.
The literature on suicide: a multidisciplinary view The seminal work in the field of Sociology is Durkheim׳s Le Suicide (1897). In this classic book, the author explored several indicators (namely, gender, marital status, economic conditions, among others) that could influence suicidal behavior. During the past century, two distinctive sociological theories of suicide were identified to link the suicide rate to the socio-economic environment. Specifically, Lester (2001) summarized them in the following way: The first economists that analyzed this phenomenon were Hamermesh and Soss (1974) who formalized a model of the utility maximization decision faced by those contemplating suicide, determined by the permanent income (i.e., the average expected income over a person׳s life) and the current age of the individual. Since the opportunity cost of suicide is the forgone earnings in the rest of one׳s life, their buy NSC59984 predicts that suicide rates rise as lifetime income falls. Within the US, these authors found that the mild cyclical decreases in economic activity since the World War II have produced the same proportionate increases in suicide rates that resulted from the stronger cyclical fluctuations in the Great Depression. Several macro empirical studies show that the relation between suicide rates and output measures is not as straightforward. Although suicide rates increased rapidly in the United States (Granados & Diez Roux, 2009) during the Great Depression, and in Korea (Watts, 1998) and Japan (Chang, Gunnell, Sterne, Lu, & Cheng, 2009) after the outbreak of the Southeast Asian financial crisis, suicides declined during times of severe economic crisis in Finland and Sweden (Hintikka, Saarinen, & Viinamaki, 1999; Ostamo et al., 2001; Stuckler, Basu, Suhrcke, Coutts, & McKee, 2009). This latter outcome may be explained by the social safety nets put in place to support citizens in times of crisis. Macro empirical studies that employ longer time series are rare, with some notable exceptions. Yang and Lester (1990), to begin with, using a time-series from 1940 to 1984 in the US, explored the extent to which social (divorce rates and females in the labor force) and economic variables (the Gross National Product per capita and its growth rate) could predict the actual suicide rate. In this study, the short-term movement of the suicide rate is linked to short-term fluctuations in the growth rate of the gross national product per capita in the opposite direction. Feijun Luo, Florence, Quispe-Agnoli, Ouyang, and Crosby (2011), extended the time series analysis from 1928 to 2007 by inspecting the connections of total and age-specific suicide rates with business cycles and concluded that age-specific rates responded differently to recessions and expansions. Using nonparametric tests and correlation, the author indicated that the overall suicide rate and the suicide rates of the groups aged 25–34 years, 35–44, 45–54 and 55–64 years rose during contractions and declined during expansions. However, the groups aged 15–24 years, 65–74, and 75 and older did not exhibit this pattern. Correlation results were concordant with all nonparametric results except for the group aged 65–74 years. Finally, the cross-country differences and the trends of suicide rates in 71 countries (including Portugal) from 1950 to 2004 are described by Liu (2009). Using data from the WHO׳s Mortality Database, he shows that suicide rates display a strong temporal stability per country but, among them, suicide rates vary greatly even within the same region or at comparable levels of development.