Draft Eligibility Research Articles

Impact of Vietnam-era G.I. Bill eligibility on later-life blood pressure distribution: evidence from the Vietnam draft lottery natural experiment.

We quantified the impact of Vietnam-era G.I Bill eligibility, which subsidized college education for eligible Veterans, on the later-life blood pressure distribution by exploiting the Vietnam draft lottery natural experiment. We restricted Health and Retirement Study data (2006-2018) to men born between 1947-1953 (N=1,970). We estimated intention-to-treat effects at the mean and 1st-99th quantiles of blood pressure using linear and quantile regressions. Our outcomes were systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), hypertension, and self-reported stroke. We proxied G.I. Bill eligibility using lottery-defined draft eligibility. We also conducted analyses stratified by childhood socioeconomic status (cSES) defined based on a previously validated measure. Draft eligibility reduced mean blood pressure outcomes (e.g., effect on SBP: -1.33 [95% confidence interval (CI) -2.85, 0.19]). Draft eligibility also had larger protective effects at higher quantiles of the SBP and DBP distributions relative to lower quantiles (effects on SBP at the 10th and 90th quantiles: -0.33mmHg [95% CI -2.35,1.68]; -3.00mmHg [95% CI -5.68,-0.32]). Draft eligibility had protective effects on blood pressure among low and medium cSES men but opposite effects among high cSES men. G.I. Bill eligibility reshaped the blood pressure distribution to one of lower morbidity risk, particularly among low and medium cSES men.

The Effects of Vietnam-Era Military Service on the Long-Term Health of Veterans: A Bounds Analysis

We analyze the short- and long-term effects of the U.S. Vietnam-era military service on veterans' health outcomes using a restricted version of the National Health Interview Survey 1974-2013 and employing the draft lotteries as an instrumental variable (IV). We start by assessing whether the draft lotteries, which have been used as an IV in prior literature, satisfy the exclusion restriction by placing bounds on its net or direct effect on the health outcomes of individuals who are non-veterans regardless of their draft eligibility (the never takers). Since we do not find evidence against the validity of the IV, we assume its validity in conducting inference on the health effects of military service for individuals who comply with the draft-lotteries assignment (the compliers), as well as for those who volunteer for enlistment (the always takers). The causal analysis for volunteers, who represent over 75% of veterans, is novel in this literature that typically focuses on the compliers. Since the effect for volunteers is not point-identified, we employ bounds that rely on a mild mean weak monotonicity assumption. We examine a large array of health outcomes and behaviors, including mortality, up to 40 years after the end of the Vietnam War. We do not find consistent evidence of detrimental health effects on compliers, in line with prior literature. For volunteers, however, we document that their estimated bounds show statistically significant detrimental health effects that appear 20 years after the end of the conflict. As a group, veterans experience similar statistically significant detrimental health effects from military service. These findings have implications for policies regarding compensation and health care of veterans after service.

The Intergenerational Effects of the Vietnam Draft on Risky Behaviors

We exploit the natural experiment provided by the Vietnam lottery draft to evaluate the intergenerational effect of fathers’ draft eligibility on children’s propensity to engage in risky health behaviors during adolescence using the NLSY97. Draft eligibility increases measures of substance use, intensity of use, decreases age of initiation—particularly for marijuana—and increases measures of delinquency. We explore potential mechanisms: Draft eligibility affects paternal parenting styles and attitudes towards the respondent, environmental aspects, and even maternal factors. Results are robust to alternative specifications and falsification diagnostics. Our results indicate that previous analyses underestimate the full negative effects of draft eligibility. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

The Impressment of Foreign-Born Soldiers in the Union Army

Abstract In 1862–1863 well over one thousand foreign-born men living in the United States argued that they had been illegally drafted into Union military service. Fearing a diplomatic row, the Lincoln administration sought to clarify the rules of draft eligibility and its relation to citizenship. William Seward, secretary of state, determined to include in the pool of potential draftees men who had filed their declaration of intent to become American citizens and men who had voted in any election in the United States. Seward’s policy, already in action in 1862, partially codified in the Enrollment Act of March 3, 1863, and further enunciated in circulars from the Departments of State and War, broadened and redefined the nature of American citizenship. By highlighting the parallels to earlier forms of impressment, and breaking new ground with a quantitative analysis of the Department of State’s Case Files on Drafted Aliens, we argue that this history of forced military service for foreign-born soldiers during the American Civil War should be considered an example of impressment. With additional source material from archives in England, the Netherlands, and Denmark, we demonstrate the extent of Union impressment and its transnational character. Concerns about forced service were widespread and had significant consequences for Union foreign relations with European countries and for immigrant communities domestically. Official complaints about impressment represented a new kind of draft resistance, in which legal and political knowledge, as well as local and regional immigrant networks, were essential for securing freedom from military service.

Testing Local Average Treatment Effect Assumptions

In this paper, we propose an easy-to-implement procedure to test the key conditions for the identification and estimation of the local average treatment effect (LATE; Imbens & Angrist, 1994). We reformulate the testable implications of LATE assumptions as two conditional inequalities, which can be tested in the intersection bounds framework of Chernozhukov, Lee, and Rosen (2013) and easily implemented using the Stata package of Chernozhukov et al. (2015). We apply the proposed tests to the draft eligibility instrument in Angrist (1991), the college proximity instrument in Card (1993), and the same-sex instrument in Angrist and Evans (1998).

Historical Perspective on Public Support for the Draft: War Costs and Military Service

The military draft was once an important element of American national security policy with widespread popular backing. The collapse in public support for it is an important historical puzzle. Public opinion about the draft also offers an arena for assessing the role of war costs, such as military casualties, in shaping attitudes toward national security policy. The costs of the draft fall on a readily identifiable segment of the population. However, surveys administered during several different historical periods provide only limited evidence that these costs affect individual opinion. Draft eligibility reduced support for conscription during peacetime but not during major wars, when the cost of being drafted was greatest. By contrast, military service had a more consistent socializing effect, with veterans and their families expressing greater support for the draft. Together, these and other individual-level processes suggest a possible explanation for the decline in aggregate support for conscription that has more to do with changing force structure and elite leadership than with public aversion to the costs of war. The results also suggest that war costs have more complicated effects on public opinion than most research on public support for war implies.

Functioning Decreases Before Symptoms Start in Schizophrenia

Clinicians and patients would benefit from the identification of early schizophrenia symptoms. To learn more about early symptoms, researchers cross-referenced a national hospitalization database in Israel with data from mandatory psychological and functional assessments of draft eligibility in 723,316 Israeli males aged 16 to 17 (mean follow-up, 10 years). The data provided pre-illness information about functioning in 3929 individuals who were eventually hospitalized …

Testing LATE Assumptions

In this paper, we discuss the key conditions for the identification and estimation of the local average treatment effect (LATE, Imbens and Angrist, 1994): the valid instrument assumption (LI) and the monotonicity assumption (LM). We show that the joint assumptions of LI and LM have a testable implication that can be summarized by a sign restriction defined by a set of intersection bounds. We propose an easy-to-implement testing procedure that can be analyzed in the framework of Chernozhukov, Lee, and Rosen (2013) and implemented using the Stata package of Chernozhukov,Kim, Lee, and Rosen (2013). We apply the proposed tests to the “draft eligibility” instrument in Angrist (1991), the “college proximity” instrument in Card (1993) and the “same sex” instrument in Angrist and Evans (1998).

DRAWN INTO VIOLENCE: EVIDENCE ON “WHAT MAKES A CRIMINAL” FROM THE VIETNAM DRAFT LOTTERIES

Draft lottery number assignment during the Vietnam Era provides a natural experiment to examine the effects of military service on crime. Using exact dates of birth for inmates in state and federal prisons in 1979, 1986, and 1991, we find that draft eligibility increases incarceration for violent crimes but decreases incarceration for nonviolent crimes among whites. This is particularly evident in 1979, where two‐sample instrumental variable estimates indicate that military service increases the probability of incarceration for a violent crime by 0.34 percentage points and decreases the probability of incarceration for a nonviolent crime by 0.30 percentage points. We conduct two falsification tests, one that applies each of the three binding lotteries to unaffected cohorts and another that considers the effects of lotteries that were not used to draft servicemen. (JEL K42, H56)

Why Tennis is a Dying Sport in the U.S.

This paper focuses on an economic approach to why tennis is a dying sport in the U.S. Three main reasons are analyzed. The first reason is the emergence of football and basketball as profitable sports in this country. The second is the nature of tennis itself that lends to its demise in an environment of sports as big business in the U.S. Lastly, tennis is mostly an individual sport and hence doesn’t create profit opportunities for colleges and/or professional leagues. Football and basketball are a major source of revenues for many universities, the NCAA, and professional leagues. Even though it is concentrated on college and professional levels, the effects reverberate all the way down to the earliest recognition of talent in a child. Sport talent is recognized at a younger age now. Children who possess talent or a skill unique to sports start to focus on a sport (or two at the most) at an early age. The nature of football and basketball as team sports necessitates an institution (usually schools) to organize, train, and coach the young athletes. This continues up to college level (at least one year for basketball). The NBA changed the minimum age for draft eligibility to 19 years old in 2005, practically forcing high school basketball players to spend at least one year in college. The second reason tennis is a dying sport in the U.S. is the nature of the sport itself. The skills that are applicable to tennis are eye-hand coordination, being able to run fast, and endurance. These skills are transferable to other sports. Eye-hand coordination is important in baseball, basketball, and golf. Athleticism is central to success in football, basketball, and pretty much any other sports. Since these kinds of skills can be recognized in a child at an early age and football and basketball are profitable sports, the result is that those youths who possess one or more of these skills are encouraged to focus on one of those sports (or, if the eye-hand coordination skill is striking, baseball or golf).The third reason is that tennis is an individual sport. Tennis players peak at a young age and they usually leave school to become professional athletes. This is the complete opposite of football and basketball, which are team sports, and hence require organization and coaching (at the very least for players to play as a team). Hence, tennis provides few, if any, opportunities for colleges or universities to profit off of it. In fact, it is one of the sport programs that incur costs but not revenues to a higher educational institution.In this paper, I provide a qualitative analysis on each of the aforementioned causes of the dying of tennis, supported by data and interviews with coaches and tennis players. I hope that this paper can contribute to the discussion on tennis as a dying sport and help explain the intricate, and sometimes unclear, relationship among sports. My hope is to also try to explain the effects of the emergence of football and basketball as big business on other sports.

The Long-Term Effects of Military Conscription on Mortality: Estimates From the Vietnam-Era Draft Lottery

Research on the effects of Vietnam military service suggests that Vietnam veterans experienced significantly higher mortality than the civilian population at large. These results, however, may be biased by nonrandom selection into the military if unobserved background differences between veterans and nonveterans affect mortality directly. To generate unbiased estimates of exposure to conscription on mortality, the present study compares the observed proportion of draft-eligible male decedents born 1950-1952 to the (1) expected proportion of draft-eligible male decedents given Vietnam draft-eligibility cutoffs; and (2) observed proportion of draft-eligible decedent women. The results demonstrate no effect of draft exposure on mortality, including for cause-specific death rates. When we examine population subgroups-including splits by race, educational attainment, nativity, and marital status-we find weak evidence for an interaction between education and draft eligibility. This interaction works in the opposite direction of putative education-enhancing, mortality-reducing effects of conscription that have, in the past, led to concern about a potential exclusion restriction violation in instrumental variable (IV) regression models. We suggest that previous research, which has shown that Vietnam-era veterans experienced significantly higher mortality than nonveterans, might be biased by nonrandom selection into the military and should be further investigated.

Conscription and Crime: Evidence from the Argentine Draft Lottery

We estimate the causal effect of mandatory participation in military service on individuals' subsequent involvement in criminal activities. To identify this causal effect, we exploit the random assignment of young men to conscription in Argentina through a draft lottery. Using a dataset that includes draft eligibility, participation in military service, and criminal records, we find that conscription increases the likelihood of developing a criminal record. The effects are significant not only for cohorts that provided military service during wartime, but also for those that served during peacetime. Our results do not support the introduction of conscription for anti-crime purposes. JEL (H56, K42, O17)

Conscription and Crime: Evidence from the Argentine Draft Lottery

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.

Drawn into Violence: Evidence on 'What Makes a Criminal' from the Vietnam Draft Lotteries

Draft lottery number assignment during the Vietnam era provides a natural experiment to examine the effects of military service on crime. Using exact dates of birth for inmates in state and federal prisons in 1979, 1986, and 1991, we find robust evidence of effects on violent crimes among whites. In particular, we find that draft eligibility increases incarceration rates for violent crimes by 14 to 19 percent. Based on Angrist and Chen's (2008) estimate of the effect of draft eligibility on veteran status, these estimates imply that military service increases the probability of incarceration for a violent crime by 0.27 percentage points. Results for nonwhites are not robust. We conduct two falsification tests, one that applies each of the three binding lotteries to unaffected cohorts and another that considers the effects of lotteries that were not used to draft servicemen.

THE HEALTH EFFECTS OF MILITARY SERVICE: EVIDENCE FROM THE VIETNAM DRAFT

There is a strong cross‐sectional association between military service and adverse health. However, veterans differ very significantly in their observable characteristics from nonveterans, suggesting that some of the association between military service and adverse health may be due to omitted variables bias. To address this problem, we use draft eligibility as an instrument for military service. Despite a very strong first‐stage relationship between draft eligibility and military service, the two‐stage least squares estimates of the difference in health between veterans and nonveterans are statistically insignificant and too imprecise to preclude the differences in health found in the cross‐sectional regressions. (JEL H56, I12, I18)

Alcohol consumption in men exposed to the military draft lottery: A natural experiment

The randomized natural experiment provided by the military draft lotteries of 1970, 1971, and 1972 is used to compare alcohol consumption in men born in the years 1950, 1951, and 1952. Alcohol consumption data are derived from the National Health Interview Survey supplements for 1977, 1983, and 1985. The analysis follows an intention-to-draft paradigm, where draft eligibility is determined solely by randomly assigned lottery numbers. Draft eligibility status is found to be unassociated with alcohol consumption, despite the fact that eligibility for the draft significantly increased the likelihood of military service and that veterans are more likely to report increased alcohol consumption compared to nonveterans. The randomized draft lottery provides an elegant natural experiment that potentially obviates the problem of confounding by premilitary service factors found in previous studies of alcohol consumption among veterans and nonveterans. However, the indirect association between draft eligibility and any health outcome (where military service is an intervening variable), together with the failure of the draft to produce a higher percent of veterans, prohibits application in all but the largest samples.

Delayed effects of the military draft on mortality. A randomized natural experiment.

To study the effect of military service during the Vietnam era on subsequent mortality, we analyzed a randomized natural experiment, the military draft lottery of 1970 to 1972. Between 1974 and 1983, there were 14,145 deaths among California and Pennsylvania men whose dates of birth were in the years for which the draft lottery was held. The group of men with birth dates that made them eligible for the draft had a higher mortality rate than the group with birth dates that exempted them from the draft: suicide was increased by 13 percent (P = 0.005 by two-tailed test), death from motor-vehicle accidents by 8 percent (P = 0.03), and total mortality by 4 percent (P = 0.03). Only 26 percent of the men who were eligible for the draft actually entered the military. If military service (rather than draft eligibility) was the actual risk factor, suicide and death from motor-vehicle accidents would have to have been increased by 86 percent and 53 percent among men who served in the military, to produce the increased risk that we observed among all draft-eligible men. A separate analysis that compared the causes of death in veterans and nonveterans yielded similar estimates: veterans were 65 percent and 49 percent more likely to die from suicide and motor-vehicle accidents, respectively. We conclude that the most likely explanation for these findings is that military service during the Vietnam War caused an increase in subsequent deaths from suicide and motor-vehicle accidents.

Some Social Effects of Draft Eligibility in Australia

Some Social Effects of Draft Eligibility in Australia

Economics of the Military Draft

I. The conceptual framework, 396. — II. The model, 402. — III. Empirical application, 406. — IV. Some extensions of the analysis, 411. — V. Conclusion, 421.