Does Money Buy Enough Happiness: Investigating the Relationship Between Income and Suicide Rates

The number of suicides documented across the United States has been steadily increasing for several decades, despite there being a decrease globally. Our research explores the effect that household income may have on this counterintuitive relationship by using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics from 2010 - 2019. Our Fixed Effects regression model will identify causal relationships within our panel data set and illustrate how suicide rates fluctuate with household income and demographics. We predict that median household income will have a negative association with the average number of suicides across United States counties. This analysis prompts further questions of how policymakers and activists can address the causes of the increasing number of suicides within the United States