Working Paper: NBER ID: w25530
Authors: Daniel Cerqueira; Danilo Santa Cruz Coelho; John J. Donohue; Marcelo Fernandes; Jony Arrais Pinto Jr.
Abstract: There is a consensus that the proportion of suicides committed with a firearm is the best proxy for gun ownership prevalence. Cerqueira et al. (2108) exploit the socioeconomic characteristics of suicide victims in order to develop a new and more refined proxy. It is based on the fixed effects of the victim's place of residence estimated from a discrete choice model for the likelihood of committing suicide with gun. We empirically assess this new indicator using gun ownership data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and suicide registers of the US National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) from 1995 through 2004. We demonstrate that this new gun proxy provides significant gains in correlation with the percentage of households with firearms.
Keywords: gun ownership; suicide; proxy measures; socioeconomic characteristics
JEL Codes: K14
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| proportion of suicides committed with firearms (H56) | gun ownership prevalence (F52) |
| new proxy (Y60) | percentage of households with firearms (D14) |
| fixed effects of suicide victim demographics (J17) | new proxy (Y60) |
| new proxy (Y60) | correlation with benchmark measure of gun ownership (C46) |