Fatherless: The Long-Term Effects of Losing a Father in the U.S. Civil War

Yannick Dupraz and Andreas Ferrara

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Abstract: We estimate the causal effect of losing a father in the U.S. Civil War on children's long-run socioeconomic outcomes. Linking military records from the 2.2 million Union Army soldiers with the 1860 U.S. population census, we track soldiers' sons into the 1880 and 1900 census. Sons of soldiers who died had lower occupational income scores and were less likely to work in a high-or semiskilled job as opposed to being low-skilled or farmers. These effects persisted at least until the 1900 census. Our results are robust to instrumenting paternal death with the mortality rate of the father's regiment, which we argue was driven by military strategy that did not take into account the social origins of soldiers. Prewar family wealth is a strong mitigating factor: there is no effect of losing a father in the top quartile of the wealth distribution.

Keywords: U.S. civil war; Orphans; Intergenerational Mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-hea and nep-his
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Published in Journal of Human Resources, In press, 59 (6), pp.0122-12118R2. ⟨10.3368/jhr.0122-12118R2⟩

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Working Paper: Fatherless: The Long-Term Effects of Losing a Father in the U.S. Civil War (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04127077

DOI: 10.3368/jhr.0122-12118R2

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