| Abstract: |
Are suicides rational? At least since the 70's economists have been trying to
shed light on this question by studying whether suicide rates are related to
contemporaneous economic conditions. This paper goes one step further: we test
whether suicides are linked to forward-looking behavior. In Italy, collective
sentence reductions (pardons) often lead to massive releases of prisoners.
More importantly, they are usually preceded by prolonged parliamentary
activity (legislative proposals, discussion, voting, etc.) that inmates seem
to follow closely. We use the legislative proposals for collective pardons to
measure changes in the inmates' expectations about their date of release, and
find that suicide rates tend to be significantly lower when pardons are
proposed in congress. This suggests that, amongst inmates in Italian prisons,
the average decision to commit suicide has a rational component. |