The impact of COVID-19 Employment Shocks on Suicide and Safety Net Use : An Early-stage Investigation

This paper examines whether the COVID-19-induced employment shocks have increased suicides and safety net use in the second and third quarters of 2020. We exploit plausibly exogenous regional variation in the magnitude of the employment shocks in Japan and adopt a difference-in-differences research design to identify the employment-shock impact. Our preferred point estimates suggest that a one-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate in the second quarter of 2020 resulted in, approximately, an additional 0.39 suicides, 89 and 82 recipients of two temporary loan programs, 28 recipients of the Housing Security Benefit, and 11 recipients of Public Assistance per 100,000 population per month. A simple calculation based on these estimates suggests that if a region experienced a one-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate caused by the COVID-19 crisis in the second quarter of 2020, which is roughly equivalent to the third-highest regional employment shock, this could have led to 30.3%, 40.4%, and 25.2% increases in the total, female, and male suicide rates respectively in July 2020 compared with July 2019