Is there an economic dimension to suicide? Evidence from climate and agriculture in India

The multifaceted determinants of suicide have long been studied by psychologists and sociologists, but only a small and more recent literature in economics has contributed to understanding this phenomenon. We utilize a comprehensive set of suicide data from India, one of the countries most publicly struggling with rising suicide rates today, to look for evidence of economically motivated suicide. Using state-level panel data on suicide rates between the years 1967 and 2013 and exogenous variation in climate, we (a) identify the causal effect of variations in temperature and precipitation on suicide rates across the country; and (b) find empirical support for an economic channel through which these shocks affect suicide. We employ a fixed effects framework to show that temperature has a positive and significant effect on suicide, but only during India’s main agricultural growing season, when high temperatures also lower crop yields. For growing season days above 10◦C, a 1◦C increase in daily temperature causes an additional 370 suicides. The magnitude and robustness of this result, in tandem with additional mechanism tests, suggests the presence of an important economic component to suicide. Contrary to public discussions of drought and suicide in India, growing season precipitation has a minimal impact on suicide rates. We find evidence that both temperature and precipitation effects operate, at least in part, through economic channels. Our results provide some justification for the development of suicide prevention policies that ameliorate the negative economic shocks suffered by agriculture-dependent households in India, such as debt relief. We also contribute to a growing literature on the social and economic impacts of climate change. Suicide prevalence, an indicator of severe hardship, may capture facets of welfare previously unmeasured in the climate change literature, and thus suggests a new avenue through which we can assess the climate-welfare relationship. ∗Carleton: Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Berkeley. Email: [email protected]. Baysan: Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Berkeley. Email: [email protected].