I analyze the relationship between state-level economic shocks and suicides using gold mined in the United States (US) between 1840 and 1860 as a large unexpected economic shock. Mined gold was an unexpected and large economic shock of up to 3.5% of GDP. This provides as good as random variation to the local economy that I use to estimate the effect of economic changes on suicides. Comprehensive mortality data by state and year does not exist for the US for 1840–1860. Thus, I use web-scraped data from a newspaper archive and use suicide mentions per 100,000 pages to proxy for suicides. Overall, results show that mined gold is linked with an apparent reduction in newspaper suicide mentions in line with previous research.

中文翻译：

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19 世纪美国淘金热期间自杀事件减少的新（报纸）证据

我将 1840 年至 1860 年间在美国 (US) 开采的黄金用作大规模的意外经济冲击来分析州级经济冲击与自杀事件之间的关系。开采黄金是一个意想不到的巨大经济冲击，高达 GDP 的 3.5%。这与当地经济的随机变化一样好，我用它来估计经济变化对自杀的影响。美国不存在 1840-1860 年按州和年份划分的综合死亡率数据。因此，我使用从报纸档案中抓取的网络数据，并使用每 100,000 页的自杀提及来代表自杀。总体而言，结果表明，与之前的研究一致，开采黄金与报纸自杀提及的明显减少有关。