An analysis of death data from 1999-2015 suggests that raising the minimum wage and earned-income tax credit by 10 percent could prevent about 1,230 suicides -- or "deaths of despair" -- a year in the U.S. The national suicide rate has risen 35 percent since 2000, and the researchers found that the rates fell in states that increased their minimum wage or the tax credit for working class families. "When they implement these policies, suicides fall very quickly," says study co-author
Anna Godoey, a labor economist and postdoctoral scholar at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at Berkeley's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. The study was published in the National Bureau of Economic Research. Co-authors included
economics professor Michael Reich, chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics,
public-health professor William Dow, and
doctoral public health student Christopher Lowenstein. For more on this, see our story at
Berkeley News. Other stories on this topic appeared in
Forbes,
New York Magazine, and
Business Insider UK.