Payday Lending Access and Suicide

This paper examines whether access to payday loans affects mortality, focusing on suicide among working-age adults. Payday lending has ambiguous welfare effects: short-term credit may help liquidity-constrained households smooth shocks, but high fees and rollovers can generate debt cycles and financial stress. The analysis combines cause-specific mortality from the National Vital Statistics System Multiple Cause-of-Death files (1994-2004) with county-year population counts from SEER, disaggregated by age, sex, and race, to construct suicide and cancer death rates of adults aged 19-64. Following \citet{Melzer2011}'s border-based approach, the empirical strategy exploits a quasi-experimental setting in which Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York prohibit payday lending but border states that legalize it; counties within 25 miles of a payday-allowing neighbor are classified as having de facto access. Difference-in-differences models with county and year fixed effects, complemented by staggered adoption event-study estimates, show no statistically significant effects of payday access on suicide rates overall or by age group. Placebo regressions for cancer mortality rates likewise reveal no systematic relationship with payday access.