Military Conscription and the (Socially) Optimal Number of Boots on the Ground

Berck, Peter; Lipow, Jonathan

doi:10.4284/0038-4038-78.1.95

Cited by 11 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…First, since the military does not have to pay a premium for drafting high-ability individuals, it is unlikely that the draft would balance a draftee's productivity while in the military with the opportunity cost of pulling him or her out of the civilian labour market. The individuals selected for military service would be overly skilled (see Berck and Lipow 2011). Second, conscripts will form the main recruitment pool for the professional branch of the Swedish Armed Forces.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-Selection and Recruit Quality in Sweden’s All Volunteer Force: Do Civilian Opportunities Matter?

Bäckström

2021

Defence and Peace Economics

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This paper studies how local labour market conditions influence the quality composition of those who volunteer for military service in Sweden. I estimate a fixed-effects regression model on a panel data set containing IQ scores for those who applied for military basic training across Swedish municipalities during the period 2010 to 2016. The main finding is that low civilian employment rates at the local level tend to increase the mean IQ score of those who volunteer for military service, whereas the opposite is true if employment rates in the civilian labour market move in a more favourable direction. As such, the results suggest that the negative impact of a strong civilian economy on recruitment volumes is reinforced by a deterioration in recruit quality.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-Selection and Recruit Quality in Sweden’s All Volunteer Force: Do Civilian Opportunities Matter?

Bäckström

2021

Defence and Peace Economics

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“…As a result, if h < .5, then z would be declining as a result of the incremental increase in w. Should h be greater than .5, then the average aptitude of recruits would monotonically increase with the wage. Now, we continue the analysis by following Berck and Lipow (2011) in assuming a function for the production of defense capability of form Q ¼ ðN zrÞ a . Using this function, we determine the value of w, w ⁄ , that provides the desired levels of capability at minimum cost.…”

Section: A Model Of Volunteer Military Manpower Mobilizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent papers in this literature include , Berck and Lipow (2011), Simon (2011), andPerri (2012). Excellent reviews of earlier research on this subject can be found in Williams and Gilroy (2006) and Asch, Hosek, and Warner (2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attitude, Aptitude, and Testing in the Efficient Mobilization of Military Manpower

Lipow

Simon

2013

Defence and Peace Economics

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“…The first is the DWL of taxation, which applies only to the volunteer system and has played a prominent role in the extant comparison of the two employment systems (Lee and Mckenzie, 1992;Ross, 1994;Warner and Asch, 1996). The second cost affects the draft system by allowing for slow-going or lower productivity among draftees (Berck and Lipow, 2011).…”

Section: System-specific Costsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Volunteer Militaries, The Draft, and Support for War

Warren

2012

Economics & Politics

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This study models how a nation's military manpower system affects the decision to go to war. Manpower systems differ primarily in how they distribute costs: the volunteer system shares the war's manpower costs broadly, whereas the draft forces a subset of the population to bear a disproportionate share of the load. This difference affects an office-and policy-motivated politician's decision to go to war. The draft induces prowar policy-makers to pursue more wars than the volunteer military does, whereas the volunteer system induces antiwar policy-makers to pursue more wars than the draft does. The manpower systems cannot be generically ranked by efficiency because each makes errors the other avoids, but the volunteer system induces selection of more efficient wars for a large class of plausible preference distributions."Militarized interstate disputes are united historical cases of conflict in which the threat, display or use of military force short of war by one member state is explicitly directed toward the government, official representatives, official forces, property, or territory of another state. Disputes are composed of incidents that range in intensity from threats to use force to actual combat short of war" Jones et al. (1996). 228 WARREN support for war, depending on how citizens are arrayed in the payoff/cost space. In particular, which system leads to more support for war turns on the size of two groups. Group 1 consists of citizens with small benefits of war. The volunteer military has a higher wage bill than does the draft, so citizens with only small benefits from war are unwilling to support a war that would require them to pay for a volunteer military, but they support war under the draft, as long as they do not have to personally fight. If there are a lot of citizens in Group 1, support for war is higher under the draft than under the volunteer military. Group 2 consists of citizens with moderate benefits and large idiosyncratic costs of fighting. They are willing to pay a volunteer to go, but do not support the war if drafted. If there are a lot of citizens in Group 2, support for war is higher under the volunteer military than under the draft. There will usually be people in both groups, so the relative size of these groups determines which system leads to more support.If we further make reasonable assumptions about the distribution of payoffs (singlepeaked), I show that Group 1 citizens are relatively numerous when average benefits are low and Group 2 citizens are relatively numerous when average benefits are high. Overall support for war under either system increases in average benefits. These results together imply that the volunteer military leads to more support than the draft when support under both systems is high and less support than the draft does when support under both systems is low. As a corollary, the volunteer military leads to more war than the draft when antiwar policy-maker controls war policy, as the marginal war with an antiwar policy-maker is one that the citizens strong...

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Military Conscription and the (Socially) Optimal Number of Boots on the Ground

Cited by 11 publications

References 12 publications

Self-Selection and Recruit Quality in Sweden’s All Volunteer Force: Do Civilian Opportunities Matter?

Self-Selection and Recruit Quality in Sweden’s All Volunteer Force: Do Civilian Opportunities Matter?

Attitude, Aptitude, and Testing in the Efficient Mobilization of Military Manpower

Volunteer Militaries, The Draft, and Support for War

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