I argue that the trend toward single households among retired men 65 years of age or older has been ongoing since 1880. When coresidence is measured by the percentage of elderly men living in the households of their children or other relatives, fully 57 percent of the decline in coresidence...

We find that veterans of the Union Army who faced greater wartime stress (as measured by higher battlefield mortality rates) experienced higher mortality rates at older ages, but that men who were from more cohesive companies were statistically significantly less likely to be affected by wartime...

We investigate when and how health shocks reverberate across the life cycle and down to descendants in a manual labor economy by examining the association of war wounds with the socioeconomic status and older age mortality of US CivilWar (1861-5) veterans and of their adult children. Younger...

We investigate when and how health shocks reverberate across the life cycle and down to descendants in a manual labor economy by examining the association of war wounds with the socioeconomic status and older age mortality of US CivilWar (1861-5) veterans and of their adult children. Younger...

“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...

Explanations for the West's escape from premature mortality have focused on chronic malnutrition or income and on public health or state capacity. We argue that by ignoring the multigenerational effects of variance in ancestors' harvests, we are underestimating the contribution of modern...

I investigate how the distribution of daily hours worked among prime-aged men has changed since the 1890s by occupational and industrial group and by the hourly wage. I find that although hours of work have fallen for all workers, the decline was disproportionately large among the lowest paid...

I use consumer expenditure surveys from 1888-1890, 1917-1919, 1935-1936, 1972-1973, and 1991 to determine whether trends in real income per capita are consistent with trends in recreational budget shares and to establish trends in inequality in recreational expenditures. I find that changes in...

During the Civil War not all men served honorably and this was known by everyone in their communities. We study how shame and ostracism affect behavior by examining whether men who deserted from the Union Army, and who faced no legal sanctions once the war was over, returned home or whether they...