Educational attainment, intelligence, interstate migration, and suicide rates in the United States: rejoinder to Abel and Kruger (2005)

Abel and Kruger (2005) reported a negative association of educational attainment and suicide rate across the United States. Given strong links between intelligence and educational attainment, this appears to be inconsistent with positive associations of intelligence and suicide rate reported in several other geographical studies. However, the apparent inconsistencies may reflect interstate migration within the U.S. adult population. Testing this hypothesis showed that interstate migration was more strongly related to state suicide rates than educational attainment. Thus, the different results obtained by Abel and Kruger could reflect migration effects, which for the U.S. might render adult-age indicators of educational attainment inappropriate to reflect regional variation in intelligence by place of birth.