Health, Stress, and Social Networks: Evidence from Union Army Veterans

Dora L. Costa, Matthew E. Kahn

NBER Working Paper No. 14053
Issued in June 2008
NBER Program(s):Economics of Aging, Development of the American Economy

We find that veterans of the Union Army who faced greater wartime stress (as measured by higher battlefield mortality rates) experienced higher mortality rates at older ages, but that men who were from more cohesive companies were statistically significantly less likely to be affected by wartime stress. Our results hold for overall mortality, mortality from ischemic heart disease and stroke, and new diagnoses of arteriosclerosis. Our findings represent one of the first long-run health follow-ups of the interaction between stress and social networks in a human population in which both stress and social networks are arguably exogeneous.

Acknowledgments

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w14053

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