Grandchildren's Longevity and Their Grandfathers' POW Trauma in the U.S. Civil War.

I document the transmission of a grandfather's net nutritional deprivation and psychosocial stress in young adulthood across multiple generations using the grandfather's ex-prisoner of war (ex-POW) status in the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865).

Overweight grandsons and grandfathers' starvation exposure.

Much of the increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity has been in developing countries with a history of famines and malnutrition. This paper is the first to examine overweight among adult grandsons of grandfathers exposed to starvation during developmental ages. I study grandsons born to grandfathers who served in the Union Army during the US Civil War (1861-5) where some grandfathers experienced severe net malnutrition because they suffered a harsh POW experience.

Children and Grandchildren of Union Army Veterans: New Data Collections to Study the Persistence of Longevity and Socioeconomic Status Across Generations.

This paper introduces four new intergenerational and multigenerational datasets which follow both sons and daughters and which can be used to study the persistence of longevity, socioeconomic status, family structure, and geographic mobility across generations. The data follow the children of Black and White Union Army (US Civil War, 1861-5) veterans from birth to death, linking them to the available censuses. The White samples include an over-sample of children of ex-POWs.

Wartime health shocks and the postwar socioeconomic status and mortality of union army veterans and their children.

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 Civil War (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%.

Intergenerational transmission of paternal trauma among US Civil War ex-POWs.

We study whether paternal trauma is transmitted to the children of survivors of Confederate prisoner of war (POW) camps during the US Civil War (1861-1865) to affect their longevity at older ages, the mechanisms behind this transmission, and the reversibility of this transmission. We examine children born after the war who survived to age 45, comparing children whose fathers were non-POW veterans and ex-POWs imprisoned in very different camp conditions. We also compare children born before and after the war within the same family by paternal ex-POW status.

Persistent Social Networks: Civil War Veterans Who Fought Together Co-Locate in Later Life.

We demonstrate the long reach of early social ties in the location decision of individuals and in their older age mortality risk using data on Union Army veterans of the US Civil War (1861-5). We estimate discrete choice migration models to quantify the trade-offs across locations faced by veterans. Veterans were more likely to move to a neighborhood or county where men from their same war company lived and were more likely to move to such areas than to areas where other veterans were located.

Data set from the Union Army samples to study locational choice and social networks.

We describe the publicly available data created by the NIA funded Early Indicators program project, often referred to as the Union Army data, and the subset of these data used in "Persistent Social Networks: Civil War Veterans Who Fought Together Co-Locate in Later Life" (Costa et al., Forthcoming) [1]. This data subset can be used for reproducibility and extensions and also illustrates how the original complex data derived from archival administrative records can be used.

DEATH AND THE MEDIA: INFECTIOUS DISEASE REPORTING DURING THE HEALTH TRANSITION.

In the late 19th Century, cities in Western Europe and the United States suffered from high levels of infectious disease. Over a 40 year period, there was a dramatic decline in infectious disease deaths in cities. As such objective progress in urban quality of life took place, how did the media report this trend? At that time newspapers were the major source of information educating urban households about the risks they faced.

Union Army Veterans, All Grown Up.

This paper overviews the research opportunities made possible by a NIA-funded program project, Early Indicators, Intergenerational Processes, and Aging. Data collection began almost three decades ago on 40,000 soldiers from the Union Army in the US Civil War. The sample contains extensive demographic, economic, and medical data from childhood to death.

Declining Mortality Inequality within Cities during the Health Transition.

In the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, large cities had extremely high death rates from infectious disease. Within major cities such as New York City and Philadelphia, there was significant variation at any point in time in the mortality rate across neighborhoods. Between 1900 and 1930 neighborhood mortality convergence took place in New York City and Philadelphia.

Leaders: Privilege, Sacrifice, Opportunity, and Personnel Economics in the American Civil War.

US Civil War data allow examinations of theories of leadership. By observing both leaders and followers during the war and 40 years after it, I establish that the most able became wartime leaders, that leading by example from the front was an effective strategy in reducing desertion rates, and that leaders later migrated to the larger cities because this is where their superior skills would have had the highest payoffs. I find mixed evidence on whether leaders were created or born.

Scarring and mortality selection among Civil War POWs: a long-term mortality, morbidity, and socioeconomic follow-up.

Debilitating events could leave either more frail or more robust survivors, depending on the extent of scarring and mortality selection. The majority of empirical analyses find more frail survivors. I find heterogeneous effects.

Pensions and Retirement Among Black Union Army Veterans.

I examine the effects of an unearned income transfer on the retirement rates and living arrangements of black Union Army veterans. I find that blacks were more than twice as responsive as whites to income transfers in their retirement decisions and 6 to 8 times as responsive in their choice of independent living arrangements. My findings have implications for understanding racial differences in rates of retirement and independent living at the beginning of the twentieth century, the rise in retirement prior to 1930, and the subsequent convergence in black-white retirement rates and living arrangements.

Health, wartime stress, and unit cohesion: evidence from Union Army veterans.

We find that Union Army veterans of the American Civil War 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 exogenous.

Economics of health and mortality special feature: race, infection, and arteriosclerosis in the past.

We document racial trends in chronic conditions among older men between 1910 and 2004. The 1910 black arteriosclerosis rate was six times higher than the white 2004 rate and more than two times higher than the 2004 black rate. We argue that blacks' greater lifelong burden of infection led to high arteriosclerosis rates in 1910.

Changing chronic disease rates and long-term declines in functional limitation among older men.

Functional limitation (difficulty walking, difficulty bending, paralysis, blindness in at least one eye, or deafness in at least one ear) in the United States fell at an average annual rate of 0.6% among men aged 50 to 74 from the early twentieth century to the early 1990s. Twenty-four percent of this decline is attributable to reductions in the debilitating effects of chronic conditions, 37% is attributable to reduced rates of chronic diseases, and the remainder is unexplained.