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Can Economic Policies Reduce Deaths of Despair? / William H. Dow, Anna Godøy, Christopher A. Lowenstein, Michael Reich.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Dow, William H.
- Series:
- Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w25787.
- NBER working paper series no. w25787
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
- Place of Publication:
- Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2019.
- Summary:
- Do minimum wages and the EITC mitigate rising "deaths of despair?" We leverage state variation in these policies over time to estimate event study and difference-in-differences models of deaths due to drug overdose, suicide, and alcohol-related causes. Our causal models find no significant effects on drug or alcohol-related mortality, but do find significant reductions in non-drug suicides. A 10 percent minimum wage increase reduces non-drug suicides among low-educated adults by 2.7 percent; the comparable EITC figure is 3.0 percent. Placebo tests and event-study models support our causal research design. Increasing both policies by 10 percent would likely prevent a combined total of more than 700 suicides each year.
- Notes:
- Print version record
- April 2019.
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