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Published on: February 22, 2018
Air quality and suicide
Claudia Persico1, Dave E Marcotte2
1Department of Public Administration and Policy, School of Public Affairs, American University, NBER, and IZA.
None:
We study the relationship between air pollution and suicide using detailed daily cause of death data from all death certificates in the U.S. over eight years. Using a two-stage residual inclusion estimator with wind direction as an instrument for daily pollution exposure, we estimated that a 1 μg/m3 increase in daily PM2.5 is associated with a 0.39% increase in daily suicides and a 50.5% increase in monthly suicide-related hospitalizations. We find relatively large effects for men, young persons, and in counties where the mean level of pollution is above the median. Our event study estimates show the relationship between pollution and suicide exposure is contemporaneous.
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