Attempted suicide produces substantial direct medical costs, which are only a part of the financial burden. Prevention targeting mood disorders, the elderly and the use of hard methods may be most cost-effective. Further research should aim at identifying additional indirect costs and the cost-effectiveness of prevention measures.

We exploit the West African Ebola epidemic as an event that necessitated the provision of a common-interest public good, Ebola control measures, to empirically investigate the effect of public good provision on state legitimacy. Our results show that state legitimacy, measured by trust in government authorities, increased with exposure to the epidemic. We argue, supported by results from SMS-message-based surveys, that a potentially important channel underlying this finding is a greater valuation of control measures in regions with intense transmission. Evidence further indicates that the effects of Ebola exposure are more pronounced in areas where governments responded relatively robustly to the epidemic.

Using subnationally representative data for 679 regions from 64 low-and middleincome countries, we document that geography, especially trade-related features, explains a substantial share of within-country variation in the level of human capital.We further show that a large part of the explanatory power can be attributed to the close interrelation between urbanization and concentration of human capital. These results bring together studies that identify human capital as an important determinant of regional development and the literature on economic geography that emphasizes geography's role in shaping the spatial distribution of urbanization and economic activity.JEL classification: O11, R11, E24

We show that the creation of the first integrated multi-modal pan-European transport network during Roman times influences economic integration over two millennia. Drawing on spatially highly disaggregated data on excavated Roman ceramics, we document that contemporary interregional trade was influenced by connectivity within the network. Today, these connectivity differentials continue to influence integration as approximated by cross-regional firm investment behaviour. Continuity is partly explained by selective infrastructure routing and cultural integration due to bilateral convergence in preferences and values. We show that our results are Roman-connectivity specific and do not reflect pre-existing patterns of exchange using pre-Roman trade data.

For a panel of 109 coastal countries we show that negative economic shocks in the fisheries sector are associated with an increase in maritime piracy. Our identification strategy uses the variation in the phytoplankton abundance off the individual countries' coasts, measured by satellite data, as a source of such shocks. We find that plankton abundance is positively related to fish catches but negatively associated with the incidence of piracy, onset and the absolute number of pirate attacks. Our instrumental variable estimates indicate that a one percent increase in fish catches reduces the risk of piracy occurring by one percentage point.JEL classification: K42, Q22, D74, O18