Incidence of female suicide in New York City: How important are socioeconomic factors?

After a steady decline in the incidence of suicide in the last 3 decades of the 20th century, suicide rates in the nation, and likewise in New York City, began to gradually rise in the years since 2000. A breakdown of the period by gender reveals that while the male suicide rate has held more or less steady, the rate amongst women has increased in every age group. The research objective of this paper is to consider a broad range of socioeconomic variables, both general and gender specific, to explore if there may be a systematic long-run relationship between these factors and suicide incidence in women in the 15 to 44 age group. Drawing on the Current Population Survey, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's Vital Statistics Data as well as Uniform Crime Reporting Data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), we construct a consistent time series spanning more than forty years and run an Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) to estimate short- and long-run relationships. In addition to economic variables such as the unemployment rate and per-capita income, we also consider social and demographic variables such as the per capita marriage rate, broad racial makeup of the population, crime statistics such as the number of reported rapes per capita, and reproductive-age pertinent variables such as per capita abortion rates and live births. Very preliminary results indicate that the unemployment rate, percent of the population that is white, number of rapes reported in the population, as well as abortion rates explain suicide rates in women in New York City.