The ability to mobilize large armies for the purposes of national defense and territorial expansion is a key feature of the modern state. Post-revolutionary France was among the first European powers to adopt large-scale conscription to man its army. For its conscription efforts to be effective,...

Many economists have analyzed the efficiency of a volunteered army relative to a conscripted army. However, they have rarely studied the working of real-world alternative, market-based, military institutions where military obligations are traded among the citizens. This paper fills this gap by...

Compulsory military service is a uniformed life event disrupting the lives of young men (and sometimes women) in countries with conscription. Consequently, the development of personality and subjective well-being during service was investigated using representative population data from the...

We identify the causal effect of compulsory military service on conscripts' subsequent labor-market outcomes by exploiting the regression-discontinuity design of the military draft in Germany during the 1950s. Unbiased estimates of military service on lifetime earnings, wages, and employment are...