For example, Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker shed light on The Economics of Crime decades ago. Dr. Becker argued that one’s decision to commit a crime may be rational if the marginal benefits of the crime outweigh the marginal costs (e.g. probability of apprehension, conviction, and punishment).
Analogously, there has been academic research analyzing the economics of suicide. The first significant academic research on suicide was by sociologist Emile Durkheim in 1897. More recently, economists Hamermesh and Soss published An Economic Theory of Suicide in the Journal of Political Economy in 1974. The model they constructed has subsequently been used by numerous other researchers.
