US County Debt and Suicide Rates During the Great Recession

This dataset supports research on the relationship between household debt and suicide rates across US counties during the Great Recession. It is authored by Scott Abrahams and was last updated in February 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyze the correlation between county-level debt-to-income ratios and suicide rates to quantify economic stress impacts.
• Investigate differential effects on suicide rates segmented by gender, specifically men, and age cohorts like adults 40-64.
• Model the welfare cost of inflexible household debt instruments using mortality and financial data from the Great Recession period.

Strengths

• Data is focused on a specific, significant economic period—the Great Recession.
• Analysis is grounded in variation across US counties, providing a geographic dimension.
• Research findings, such as effects being double for men and triple for adults 40-64, are cited in the description.

Limitations

• The specific data structure, including column names, row count, and file formats, is unknown.
• Data may be temporally limited to the Great Recession period, potentially reducing current applicability.
• The raw description is research-focused, which may mean the underlying dataset requires extraction or reconstruction from the replication package.

Provenance

Source

ICPSR Harvested Dataverse

Collection Method

null

Time Range

Great Recession period

Freshness

null

Geography

US counties