Surviving Andersonville : the Benefits of Social Networks in Pow

JEL Classification: I120, Z130 Twenty-seven percent of the Union Army prisoners captured July 1863 or later died in captivity. At Andersonville the death rate may have been as high as 40 percent. How did men survive such horrific conditions? Using two independent data sets we find that friends had a statistically significant positive effect on survival probabilities and that the closer the ties between friends as measured by such identifiers as ethnicity, kinship, and the same hometown the bigger the impact of friends on survival probabilities. Dora L. Costa MIT Department of Economics, E52-274C 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142 and NBER costa@mit.edu Matthew E. Kahn The Fletcher School Tufts University Medford, MA 02155 matt.kahn@tufts.edu