EXPOSURE TO DISEASE DURING GROWING AGES AND WAR SERVICE

National Bureau Of Economic Research, Cambridge MA

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Project 1 will study the interactions among epidemiological environment, socioeconomic status, and health over the life cycle of the recruits in the Union Army sample, focusing on their childhood, military service, and prime ages. The specific aims of this project are to: 1) determine the relative contributions of community and family characteristics describing disease exposure and economic well-being to the development of height (a widely used indicator of health reflecting the cumulative nutritional status during the developmental ages) using the sample of Union Army recruits; 2) establish the relationship of height and ecological variables describing local disease environment to the presence of chronic disease in early adulthood using both the recruit sample and the 10,000-man sample of rejectees; 3) study the risks of contracting and dying from particular diseases while in service and their relationship to early-life exposure to disease as well as to socioeconomic status; 3) improve the measurement of wartime stress by developing a method of assigning index weights to various stressful wartime events according to their relative importance, and by including corrections for the selectivity of exposure to the risk of those events; 4) examine the effects on health and mortality at younger and middle ages of wartime medical events among recruits, and of chronic disease among rejectees, using the samples of recruits and rejectees linked to the 1880 census; 5) investigate how disease and disability suffered by the recruits while in service affected their economic mobility at their prime ages, focusing on the patterns of wealth accumulation between 1860 and 1870, and of occupational and geographical mobility over the life cycle of the recruits; 6) study the economic progress of African-American recruits in the late nineteenth century, with special focus on the roles played by health and military service; 7) refine the estimation of the economic costs of the Civil War, taking into account the consequence of the adverse medical events while in service on later economic performance of the war veterans.