How does racial inequality shape who dies in war? Focusing on the era of United States military segregation, we argue that discriminatory societal institutions and prejudicial attitudes combined to reduce commanders’ beliefs about Black soldiers’ combat effectiveness. These biased assessments decreased the likelihood that Black soldiers were assigned combat occupational specialties, and that Black combat units received key frontline assignments. However, commanders’ biases also created a desire to preserve white lives. Accordingly, we expect Black soldiers received worse support. These choices shaped soldiers’ risk of death. Analyzing the case of World War I (WWI), we leverage data on over 44,000 infantry fatalities and show that white units incurred four times as many combat fatalities as comparable Black units. However, holding fixed exposure to combat, Black units suffered higher levels of noncombat deaths. Commanders thus deemed Black soldiers insufficiently qualified to fight as equals, but sufficiently expendable to die in war’s least consequential conditions.

How do government counterinsurgency tactics shape the behavior of the rebels they are combating? This letter builds upon foundational theories of civil war to argue that within-conflict government actions can further increase rebels’ levels of grievances. This increases the likelihood rebels continue fighting as conflicts unfold. I test the argument using newly compiled individual-level data on over 1,700 members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army who participated in the 1916 Easter Rising. Rebels varied in whether they were interned after the uprising. I show that rebels who were interned were more likely to fight throughout the entire Irish War of Independence. Qualitative evidence corroborates the contention that internment increased rebels’ levels of grievances. The letter elucidates how within-conflict events shape rebel behavior, by documenting how the tactics governments employ as they fight can shape the subsequent actions of the rebels they are combating.

How does the design of military institutions affect who bears the costs of war? We answer this question by studying the transformative shift from segregated to integrated US military units during the Korean War. Combining new micro-level data on combat fatalities with archival data on the deployment and racial composition of military battalions, we show that Black and white soldiers died at similar rates under segregation. Qualitative and quantitative evidence provides one potential explanation for this counterintuitive null finding: acute battlefield concerns necessitated deploying military units wherever soldiers were needed, regardless of their race. We next argue that the mid-war racial integration of units, which tied the fates of soldiers more closely together, should not alter the relative fatality rates. The evidence is consistent with this expectation. Finally, while aggregate fatality rates were equal across races, segregation enabled short-term casualty discrepancies. Under segregation there were high casualty periods for white units followed by high casualty periods for Black units. Integration eliminated this variability. This research note highlights how enshrining segregationist policies within militaries creates permissive conditions for either commanders' choices, or the dictates and variability of conflict, to shape who bears war's costs.

How did personal wealth and slaveownership affect the likelihood Southerners fought for the Confederate Army in the American Civil War? On the one hand, wealthy Southerners had incentives to free-ride on poorer Southerners and avoid fighting; on the other hand, wealthy Southerners were disproportionately slaveowners, and thus had more at stake in the outcome of the war. We assemble a dataset on roughly 3.9 million free citizens in the Confederacy and show that slaveowners were more likely to fight than non-slaveowners. We then exploit a randomized land lottery held in 1832 in Georgia. Households of lottery winners owned more slaves in 1850 and were more likely to have sons who fought in the Confederate Army. We conclude that slaveownership, in contrast to some other kinds of wealth, compelled Southerners to fight despite free-rider incentives because it raised their stakes in the war’s outcome.

Prior research demonstrates that responses to surveys can vary depending on the race, gender, or ethnicity of the investigator asking the question. We build upon this research by empirically testing how information about researcher identity in online surveys affects subject responses. We do so by conducting an experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in which we vary the name of the researcher in the advertisement for the experiment and on the informed consent page in order to cue different racial and gender identities. We fail to reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference in how respondents answer questions when assigned to a putatively black/white or male/female researcher.