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Income Effects on Health: Evidence from Union Army Pensions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2015

Shari Eli
Shari Eli*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor in the Economics Department, University of Toronto, 150 St. George Street #326, Toronto, ON M5S 3G7, Canada. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

To what extent do rising income levels explain the decline in adult mortality rates experienced in the United States a century ago? I explore this question by investigating the income effect of the country's first wide-scale entitlement program: the Union Army pensions. Documenting that Republican Congressional candidates boosted pensions to secure votes, I exploit exogenous increases in income stemming from patronage politics to estimate the semi-elasticity of disease onset with respect to pensions. Income effects are large for cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and respiratory illnesses.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 75 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 448 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2015 

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Footnotes

This research stems from a chapter of my dissertation completed at U.C. Berkeley under the advising of Barry Eichengreen, J. Bradford DeLong, and Ronald Lee, who I thank for their comments and suggestions. I also thank Dora Costa, Martha Bailey, Hoyt Bleakley, Louis Cain, Robert Fogel, Nicholas Li, Edward Miguel, Suresh Naidu, and Noam Yuchtman as well as seminar participants of the U.C. Berkeley Economic History seminar, the Aging and Health Workshop at the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago, and the Empirical Microeconomics Seminar at the University of Toronto for helpful comments. I thank Carlos Villareal for constructing the digitized Congressional district maps and Noelle Yetter for her advice and assistance with the Union Army sample. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the NICHD grant T32-HD007275, NIA grant T32-AG000246, and the All-UC Group in Economic History.

References

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