Race and Older Age Mortality: Evidence from Union Army Veterans

Dora L. Costa

No 10902, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper uses the records of the Union Army to compare the older age mortality experience of the first black and white cohorts who reached middle and late ages in the twentieth century. Blacks faced a greater risk of death from all causes, especially in large cities, from infectious and parasitic diseases, from genito-urinary disease, and from heart disease, particularly valvular heart disease. Blacks' greater risk of death was the result both of the worse conditions in which they lived at the time of their deaths and of their lifelong poorer nutritional status and higher incidence of infectious disease. Compared to the 1821-40 black cohort, the 1841-50 black cohort was both under greater stress at a young age and had higher older age mortality rates.

JEL-codes: J15 N31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ltv
Date: 2004-11
Note: AG HE DAE
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10902.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10902

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10902
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().