Wartime Health Shocks and the Postwar Socioeconomic Status and Mortality of Union Army Veterans and their Children

Dora Costa, Noelle Yetter, Heather DeSomer

NBER Working Paper No. 25480
Issued in January 2019, Revised in December 2019
NBER Program(s):Economics of Aging, Children, Development of the American Economy, Health Economics, Labor Studies

We investigate when and how health shocks reverberate across the life cycle and down to descendants in a manual labor economy by examining the association of war wounds with the socioeconomic status and older age mortality of US CivilWar (1861-5) veterans and of their adult children. Younger veterans who had been severely wounded in the war left the farm sector, becoming laborers. Consistent with human capital and job matching models, older severely wounded men were unlikely to switch sectors and their wealth declined by 37-46%. War wounds were correlated with children’s socioeconomic and mortality outcomes in ways dependent on sex and paternal age group.

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w25480

Published: Dora L. Costa & Noelle Yetter & Heather DeSomer, 2019. "Wartime Health Shocks and the Postwar Socioeconomic Status and Mortality of Union Army Veterans and their Children," Journal of Health Economics, .