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

Abstract

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.

The relationship between parental disability and child outcomes: Evidence from veteran Families

“…Thus, by focusing on the sample of children living with veteran parents, we argue that conditional on having a parent that selected into military service, the degree of the parent’s service-related disability is plausibly exogenous. This is similar to the source of identification used in [ 23 ], who find that wartime wounds from World War II service affected veterans’ subsequent labor market outcomes and even the long-run outcomes of their adult children. Moreover, our setting allows us to compare outcomes of children with more and less severely disabled parents, conditional on having a disabled parent.…”

“…However, these studies focus only on comparing children of disabled versus non-disabled parents (rather than the gradient of child outcomes with respect to the severity of parental disability) and the degree to which they can address the endogeneity of parental disability varies across studies (see [21,24,25] for the US and [26] for Vietnam). Recent work has illustrated that parental disability can have long-reaching effects on the adult socioeconomic status and mortality of the next generation [23], and our results provide evidence for pathways through which these effects arise; children of severely disabled parents are at a disadvantage at early ages along the dimensions of schooling and health. In this way, our results are useful for understanding the intergenerational transmission of health shocks more generally.…”

Eating habits, food consumption, and health: The role of early life experiences

“…Our findings also speak to a growing literature that studies the effects of shocks on health and educational outcomes of multiple generations (Vågerö et Costa et al, 2020). These papers, however, do not document that shocks to food availability lead to intergenerational effects on eating habits, nor provide evidence of intergenerational transmission through a behavioral, rather than a biological mechanism, which operates beyond the transmission of income (Waldkirch et al, 2004).…”

“…This allows us to check whether the effect is stronger among a particular treated group and to confirm that the control cohorts were unaffected. 24 We also use equation ( 1) to estimate the effects of meat scarcity on the frequency of eating meat (OLS and ordered probit) and on the probability of having an unbalanced diet (linear probability model). To verify that the treatment at the regional level indeed captures meat scarcity rather than the overall hardship of WWII, as a robustness check, we specifically control for the effects of the war at the regional level using the decrease in GDP per capita and the number of casualties per 1,000 population in the period of 1943-1945 including geographical area dummies instead of regional dummies.…”

Exposure to War and its Labor Market Consequences Over the Life Cycle

“…find that wartime military service had negative effects on German men's occupational status only in the short run Ramirez and Haas (2021). show that the long-term effects of childhood exposure to war depend critically on its timing.2 To our knowledge, the only evidence of the economic impact of war captivity and injuries comes from the American Civil War of 1861-65(Lee, 2005;Costa, 2012;Costa et al, 2020).…”