War and Marriage: Assortative Mating and the World War II GI Bill

Larsen, Matthew F.; McCarthy, T J; Moulton, Jeremy G.; Page, Marianne; Patel, Ashok Kumar

doi:10.1007/s13524-015-0426-x

Cited by 26 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 55 publications

(42 reference statements)

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“…This is due to earlier eligibility for a retirement pension for the veteran (at age 60, compared to 65 for non-veterans) and for his wife (55 compared to 60), as well as disability compensation payments for many veterans. In any case, the results do not support the suggestion that WWII service led to family disruption and dissolution, at least later in life (Damousi (Larsen et al 2015) and Vietnam (Conley and Heerwig 2013).…”

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confidence: 56%

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The Effects of World War II Military Service: Evidence from Australia

2017

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Outside of the United States, few studies have estimated the effects of World War II service. In Australia, general war-time conscription and minimal involvement in the Korean War led to large cohort differences in military service rates, which we use for identification. We find a small, temporary negative effect on employment and a substantial positive effect on post-school qualifications, but not at the university level. While service increased home ownership slightly, it greatly reduced outright home ownership, consistent with the incentives provided by veterans' housing benefits. We also find a positive effect on marriage, but only from 1971.

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confidence: 56%

“…1 Matthew Larsen et al (2015) found that this increased college participation also led veterans to marry more educated wives. They also found no effect on marital status at 1970.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Effects of World War II Military Service: Evidence from Australia

2017

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“…We might expect, given their relatively low income in the decades following the war, that draft-eligible fathers would match with lower-skilled mothers. Still, at least one paper has concluded that the additional education received by returning (WWII) veterans sorted men into higher-skilled wives (Larsen et al, 2015). military service, on average, would need to reduce annual earnings by an implausibly large amount, on the order of $100,000, which is close to 300% of the mean earnings of control sons.…”

Section: Discussion Of Mechanisms and Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fewer Vacants, Fewer Crimes? Impacts of Neighborhood Revitalization Policies on Crime

2015

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A b s t r a c tCan shocks to one generation propagate to the next? To answer this question, we study how the Vietnam draft lottery affected the next generation's labor market. Using the universe of U.S. federal tax returns, we link fathers from draft cohorts to their sons' outcomes and find that sons of fathers randomly called by the draft 1) have lower earnings and labor force participation than their peers, and 2) are more likely to volunteer for military service. These findings highlight the strong role family plays in human capital development and occupational choice. More generally, our results provide sound evidence that malleable aspects of a parent's life course can influence children's labor market outcomes and that policies that only directly alter the circumstances of one generation can have important long-run effects on the next.

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“…Similarly, explanations that are based on effects of war service on the quality of children via a demographic channel -say, if there are effects of war service on matching in marriage markets (e.g. Larsen et al 2014) -must contend with the same issue that arises in the material incentives channel we have analyzed: in the data, it seems that a father's veteran status increased the quality of children when it comes to labor market opportunities. More generally, any demographic explanation would have to be consistent with the opposite effects we find for service during and outside of wartime.…”

Section: Demographymentioning

confidence: 96%

The Intergenerational Transmission of War

Campante

Yanagizawa-Drott

2015

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We study whether war service by one generation affects service by the next generation in later wars, in the context of the major US theaters of the 20th century. To identify a causal effect, we exploit the fact that general suitability for service implies that how close to age 21 an individual's father happened to be at a time of war is a key determinant of the father's likelihood of participation. We find that a father's war service experience has a positive and significant effect on his son's likelihood of service. We estimate an intergenerational transmission parameter of approximately 0.1, across all wars, and that each individual war had a substantial impact on service in those that followed. We find evidence consistent with cultural transmission of war service from fathers to sons, and with the presence of substitutability between this direct transmission and oblique transmission (from society at large). In contrast, father's war service increases sons' educational achievement and actually reduces the likelihood of military service outside of wartime, suggesting that the results cannot be explained by material incentives or broader occupational choice. Taken together, our results indicate that a history of wars helps countries overcome the collective action problem of getting citizens to volunteer for war service.

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War and Marriage: Assortative Mating and the World War II GI Bill

Cited by 26 publications

References 55 publications

The Effects of World War II Military Service: Evidence from Australia

The Effects of World War II Military Service: Evidence from Australia

Fewer Vacants, Fewer Crimes? Impacts of Neighborhood Revitalization Policies on Crime

The Intergenerational Transmission of War

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