Family members tend to have similar labor market outcomes, but measuring the contribution of behavioral spillovers is difficult. To identify spillovers between brothers, we exploit Denmark's largest random assignment of young men to 8 months of military service where service status of brothers is correlated but draft lottery numbers are not. We find average spillovers of elder brother service on younger brother service of 7 percent, and as high as 55 percent for closely spaced brothers without sisters. Elder brother military service affects his own occupational choice and his younger brother's service through private information, thereby encouraging volunteering.
Military conscription implicitly taxes draftees. Those who would have volunteered at the market wage may be forced to serve for lower wages, and those with higher opportunity costs may be forced to serve regardless, yet little is known about the distribution of this burden. We exploit the Danish draft lottery to estimate the causal effect of military service on labor earnings of young men across the cognitive ability distribution. We find that high ability men who are induced to serve face a 7 percent earnings penalty, whereas low ability men face none. Educational career disruption is an important channel.
Military conscription implicitly taxes draftees. Those who would have volunteered at the market wage may be forced to serve for lower wages, and those with higher opportunity costs may be forced to serve regardless, yet little is known about the distribution of this burden. We exploit the Danish draft lottery to estimate the causal effect of military service on labor earnings of young men across the cognitive ability distribution. We find that high ability men who are induced to serve face a 7 percent earnings penalty, whereas low ability men face none. Educational career disruption is an important channel.
We estimate the causal effect of mandatory participation in the military service on the involvement in criminal activities. We exploit the random assignment of young men to military service in Argentina through a draft lottery to identify this causal effect. Using a unique set of administrative data that includes draft eligibility, participation in the military service, and criminal records, we find that participation in the military service increases the likelihood of developing a criminal record in adulthood. The effects are not only significant for the cohorts that performed military service during war times, but also for those that provided service at peace times. We also find that military service has detrimental effects on future performance in the labor market.
A set of predictions from the conflict theory of decision making with regard to the effects of a threat to behavioral freedom were tested. The first selective service draft lottery, drawn December 1969, in which young men with low numbers were threatened with the draft provided a vehicle for the study. Attitudes of 84 Harvard seniors toward major draft-exampt and draft-vulnerable post graduation career alternatives were measured five days before the lottery and either one day or 10 days after. Conflict theory predicted that after the lottery men with low draft numbers would (a) show a decrease in attraction toward draft vulnerable alternatives (job, graduate school, travel) because they now produced threat of the draft and (b) show an increase in attraction toward draft-exempt alternatives because they now represented a means of avoiding the draft. The results provided support for the conflict theory predictions, men with low numbers showing a decrease in attraction toward the risky, non-draft exempt alternatives and an increase in attraction toward safe, draft-exempt alternatives. Support was also obtained for other conflict theory predictions regarding attitude changes toward non-exempt activities among men with high lottery numbers. The findings indicate that following on an event that alters the value of a set of career alternatives, changes in attraction occur that are functional for a decision maker who is confronted with a choice between a desirable but risky set of alternatives, and a less desirable but safe set of alternatives. Alternate predictions and explanations for the data that could be made by dissonance theory and reactance theory were examined and possible points of reconcilliation suggested.
The 1969 Vietnam draft lottery assigned numbers to birth dates in order to determine which young men would be called to fight in Vietnam. We exploit this natural experiment to examine how draft vulnerability influenced political attitudes. Data are from the Political Socialization Panel Study, which surveyed high school seniors from the class of 1965 before and after the national draft lottery was instituted. Males holding low lottery numbers became more antiwar, more liberal, and more Democratic in their voting compared to those whose high numbers protected them from the draft. They were also more likely than those with safe numbers to abandon the party identification that they had held as teenagers. Trace effects are found in reinterviews from the 1990s. Draft number effects exceed those for preadult party identification and are not mediated by military service. The results show how profoundly political attitudes can be transformed when public policies directly affect citizens' lives.
