Permanent income shocks and suicidal ideation: Evidence from South Korea

Who falls into suicidal ideation when income drops? Drawing on the Korea Welfare Panel Study covering 2011 to 2023 and decomposing income into permanent and transitory components, I find the answer is highly concentrated. Transitory income fluctuations leave ideation almost unchanged, while permanent declines are associated with strong and durable increases in ideation, extending the permanent income logic to mental health. Households suffering persistent income declines and renters or the initially poor bear nearly all of the cost: renters carry a gradient roughly five times that of homeowners, and the initially poor several times that of the better-off. Material hardship and depressive symptoms together absorb the bulk of the income-ideation link. Administrative regional records on suicide deaths reproduce the negative income gradient and reveal a pooled male mortality response about six times the female one, even though ideation itself is more prevalent in women, a layered cognition-behaviour pattern with sex-symmetric thoughts but male-predominant lethality. The income-to-ideation gradient is markedly steeper among heavier problem-drinkers: an alcohol-disinhibition effect that operates across both sexes at the cognitive level, while the step from ideation to lethal behaviour falls predominantly on men. Together the results identify housing tenure and initial deprivation as the pressure points along which the income-mental-health gradient bites, and where social protection has the greatest scope to act.