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

Dora Costa

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 2014, vol. 30, issue 3, 437-462

Abstract: 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. I find that US cities were magnets for the most able and provided training opportunities for both leaders and followers: Men might start in a low social status occupation in a city but then move to a higher status occupation. (JEL M50, N31)

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jleo/ewt005 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Leaders: Privilege, Sacrifice, Opportunity and Personnel Economics in the American Civil War (2011)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:30:y:2014:i:3:p:437-462.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization is currently edited by Andrea Prat

More articles in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().