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"Dora L. Costa"
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Health and the Economy in the United States from 1750 to the Present
I discuss the health transition in the United States, bringing new data to bear on health indicators and investigating the changing relationship between health, income, and the environment. I argue that scientific advances played an outsize role and that health improvements were largest among the poor. Health improvements were not a precondition for modern economic growth. The gains to health are largest when the economy has moved from \"brawn\" to \"brains\" because this is when the wage returns to education are high, leading the healthy to obtain more education. More education may improve use of health knowledge, producing a virtuous cycle.
Journal Article
Heroes & cowards : the social face of war
Heroes and Cowards demonstrates the role that social capital plays in people's decisions. The makeup of various companies--whether soldiers were of the same ethnicity, age, and occupation--influenced whether soldiers remained loyal or whether they deserted. Costa and Kahn discuss how the soldiers benefited from friendships, what social factors allowed some to survive the POW camps while others died, and how punishments meted out for breaking codes of conduct affected men after the war. The book also examines the experience of African-American soldiers and makes important observations about how their comrades shaped their lives. --from publisher description
Book
ENERGY CONSERVATION \NUDGES\ AND ENVIRONMENTALIST IDEOLOGY: EVIDENCE FROM A RANDOMIZED RESIDENTIAL ELECTRICITY FIELD EXPERIMENT
\"Nudges\" are being widely promoted to encourage energy conservation. We show that the popular electricity conservation \"nudge\" of providing feedback to households on own and peers' home electricity usage in a home electricity report is two to four times more effective with political liberals than with conservatives. Political conservatives are more likely than liberals to opt out of receiving the home electricity report and to report disliking the report. Our results suggest that energy conservation nudges need to be targeted to be most effective.
Journal Article
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. The sons of ex-POWs imprisoned when camp conditions were at their worst were 1.11 times more likely to die than the sons of non-POWs and 1.09 times more likely to die than the sons of ex-POWs when camp conditions were better. Paternal ex-POW status had no impact on daughters. Among sons born in the fourth quarter, when maternal in utero nutrition was adequate, there was no impact of paternal ex-POW status. In contrast, among sons born in the second quarter, when maternal nutrition was inadequate, the sons of ex-POWs who experienced severe hardship were 1.2 times more likely to die than the sons of non-POWs and ex- POWs who fared better in captivity. Socioeconomic effects, family structure, father-specific survival traits, and maternal effects, including quality of paternal marriages, cannot explain our findings. While we cannot rule out fully psychological or cultural effects, our findings are most consistent with an epigenetic explanation.
Journal Article
Civic Engagement and Community Heterogeneity: An Economist's Perspective
Now many of them [economists] are writing about neighborhood get-togethers, PTAs, Bible study classes, and the like …. This is not necessarily a good thing.—Claude S. Fischer, “Bowling Alone: What's the Score?”The authors thank the participants in the Conference on Social Connectedness and Public Activism (Harvard University), where an earlier version of this article was delivered in May 2002; Jennifer Hochschild; and four anonymous reviewers for comments. They also thank NIH grant R01 AG19637. Additionally, Dora Costa thanks NIH grants AG12658 and AG10120.
Journal Article
From Mill Town to Board Room: The Rise of Women's Paid Labor
The widespread participation of women in paid labor outside of the home and in the highest echelons of society would have been unheard of a century ago. This paper documents this dramatic change in women's social and economic status and argues that it was determined both by contemporaneous demand factors and by the characteristics, expectations, and social norms regarding work and family of different cohorts of women. History suggests that change in women's labor force experiences may be slow because it must await the entry of new cohorts of women (and also of men) into the labor market.
Journal Article
Heroes and cowards
When are people willing to sacrifice for the common good? What are the benefits of friendship? How do communities deal with betrayal? And what are the costs and benefits of being in a diverse community? Using the life histories of more than forty thousand Civil War soldiers, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn answer these questions and uncover the vivid stories, social influences, and crucial networks that influenced soldiers' lives both during and after the war.
Drawing information from government documents, soldiers' journals, and one of the most extensive research projects about Union Army soldiers ever undertaken, Heroes and Cowards demonstrates the role that social capital plays in people's decisions. The makeup of various companies--whether soldiers were of the same ethnicity, age, and occupation--influenced whether soldiers remained loyal or whether they deserted. Costa and Kahn discuss how the soldiers benefited from friendships, what social factors allowed some to survive the POW camps while others died, and how punishments meted out for breaking codes of conduct affected men after the war. The book also examines the experience of African-American soldiers and makes important observations about how their comrades shaped their lives.
Heroes and Cowards highlights the inherent tensions between the costs and benefits of community diversity, shedding light on how groups and societies behave and providing valuable lessons for the present day.
eBook
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. Among severely stressed former Union Army prisoners of war (POWs), the effect that dominates 35 years after the end of the Civil War depends on age at imprisonment. Among survivors to 1900, those younger than 30 at imprisonment faced higher old-age mortality and morbidity and worse socioeconomic outcomes than non-POW and other POW controls, whereas those older than 30 at imprisonment faced a lower older-age death risk than the controls.
Journal Article
Estimating Real Income in the United States from 1888 to 1994: Correcting CPI Bias Using Engel Curves
This paper provides the first estimates of overall CPI bias prior to the 1970s and new estimates of bias since the 1970s. It finds that annual CPI bias was −0.1 percent between 1888 and 1919 and rose to 0.7 percent between 1919 and 1935. Annual CPI bias was 0.4 percent in the 1960s and then rose to 2.7 percent between 1972 and 1982 before falling to 0.6 percent between 1982 and 1994. The findings imply that we have underestimated growth rates in true income in the 1920s and 1930s and in the 1970s.
Journal Article