1 Cowards and Heroes: Group Loyalty in the U.S Civil War Dora L. Costa MIT and NBER Matthew E. Kahn Tufts
Jan 07, 2016
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Cowards and Heroes: Group Loyalty in the
U.S Civil War
Dora L. Costa
MIT and NBER
Matthew E. Kahn
Tufts
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Introduction
• The U.S Civil War was horrific• Soldiers knew that:
• Probability of death from disease and battle was high (20%)
• Pay was low and irregular• Punishment mechanisms were
weak• Why didn’t everyone desert?
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What motivates soldiers to be loyal to
this organization?
• Narrow self-interest cannot explain why the desertion rate was only 9%
• Alternative Explanations:• Altruism for your fellow men• Desire for their honor and
esteem• Ideology• Morale
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Empirical Contribution
• Use a unique data set of 31,850 Civil War Union soldiers to model the propensity to be a “coward” and a “hero” as a function of:
• demographics
• community characteristics
• ideology
• morale
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Cowardly and heroic deeds
• Non-market interaction
• An important aspect of human behavior that ECONLIT suggests is under-researched
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The Paper Contributes to Three Growing
Literatures
• Group Loyalty
• Levitt and Venkatash 2000,
• Berman 2000,
• Luttmer 2001,
• Poterba 1997,
• Iannaccone 1992
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Production of Social Capital
• Social Capital is the “Glue” that keeps the army united
• Growing research on the micro and macro determinants of producing social capital
• Alesina and La Ferrara 2000,
• Glaeser, Laibson and Sacerdote 2000,
• Costa and Kahn 2001
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Empirical Organizational Design
• What types of organizations “function well”?
• Outcome measures such as turnover levels are higher in more heterogenous divisions based on observables such as age, education, tenure, race and sex (see Pfeffer)
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Demand and Supply of Military Loyalty
• The military faces a tough “agency problem”.
• It produces team output – winning battles
• The military cannot observe its workers’ effort in the smoke of the battlefield.
• The “usual” solutions for agency problems cannot be utilized
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For the Military: Social Capital can substitute for
monetary incentives
• If loyalty could be built within the company this would mitigate the agency problems
• Such loyalty cannot be “purchased” it must be produced “in-house”
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How Does Social Capital help this
Organization Function?• Self-enforcing peer-pressure,
fighting is done in public and your actions are common knowledge among your peers;
• Don’t lose face, self-esteem tied to how your peer group views you
• More social capital => more group loyalty => less shirking => better chance for victory
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Will the Men Supply Loyalty?
• Survival Instincts says “no”
• BUT: If they feel altruism for their fellow men
• If they desire the respect of their company
• If they believe in the cause
• If their side has been winning recently
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Production Function Framework
• Loyalty = f(social capital, individual attributes, morale)
• Social capital = g(individual attributes, community attributes)
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Empirical Design
• Hazard model of competing risks (Weibull), why choose this?
• Our Decision Tree• Focus on coefficients on individual
attributes, company attributes, and ideology to measure “cowardice” and “heroism”
• Desertion measures “cowardice”• Promotion measures “heroism”
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Robert Fogel’s Union Army Sample
• Sample includes 31850 white men who fought for the Union
• 303 infantry companies out of 331 randomly sampled and within these companies a 100% sample
• their wealth representative of northern population
• % all northern men serving ranged from 53 to 81% in 1839-1845 birth cohorts
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Advantages of our Empirical Design
• Stakes are high
• easy for the researcher to measure “shirking” relative to the modern firm
• team members also observe “shirking”
• 303 companies provide “cross-variation”
• Small Companies but not randomly assigned
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Demographic and socio-economic Determinants
Individual Characteristics;
• occupation
• country of birth
• age and height
• total personal property wealth in 1860
• Literacy
• Marital status
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Community Determinants
• company characteristics --
• birthplace fragmentation
• occupation fragmentation
• age heterogeneity of the company
• Do you have a brother in your company?
• Population of city enlisted in
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Ideological Determinants
• Volunteer
• percent of your county of enlistment who voted for Lincoln
• Year mustered
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Morale Determinants
• Momentum variables – share of battles won in the last year
• Share of company who died
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The Geography of Cowardice and Heroism
• Table One
• Each column’s entries sum to 100%
• Wide variation
• Wisconsin and Iowa are special in terms of promotion
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Summary Statistics
• Table Two reports the means of the explanatory variables for;
• The whole sample
• For “Cowards”
• For “Heroes”
• Means differ depending on ultimate category
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We Estimate Separate Hazard Models for Desertion, Arrests,
AWOL, and Promotion
• We organize our findings by major hypothesis
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Individual Attributes
• The Deserters are:
• Older
• Literate
• Wealthier
• Irish and British
• Not German
• Married
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Community Level Variables
• Desertion probabilities are higher in companies where:
• heterogeneity is higher as measured by:
• birth place,
• occupational
• age
• if you are from a large city
• duration dependence parameter in the desertion hazard
• Fragmentation Measures
• Big City Effects
• “Dark Side” of Social Capital? Do more homogenous companies collude to avoid combat and to survive? “Special treatment and favoritism” ---
• Reflection Effects
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Community Continued
• Unlike the desertion results, the community variables do not intuitively predict promotion to officer (i.e heroism)
• Having a brother in your company raises desertion propensity but lowers AWOL propensity
• Evidence of Contagion Effect identified due to functional form
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The “Dark Side” of Social Capital
Hypothesis
• We find no evidence that in more homogenous communities that the men “collude” to straggle in back
• Some evidence of favortism if the officer and the soldier have similar attributes
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Ideology
• Desertion is Lower for:
• Men who enlist early (1861)
• Volunteers
• Men from Pro-Lincoln counties
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Morale
• Desertion falls when the company death rate is lower
• When the Union is winning battles
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Optimal Organizational Design
• Table 8 allows us to show the magnitude of our hazard estimates
• If the army wanted to minimize cowardice, Table 8 shows what we predict it could achieve
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Conclusion
• A self-interested soldier would have deserted, yet a small fraction did. Why didn’t more soldiers desert?
• Social capital and fear of loss of honor substituted for incentive pay
• The same variables that predict participation in the “modern” social capital literature predict participation in this historical setting