Excess body weight or body fat hinders performance of military duties. As a result, the U.S. military has weight-for-height and percent body fat standards for enlistment. This paper estimates the number and percent of military-age civilians who meet, and do not meet, the current active duty...

There is little econometric study of how governments should procure innovation. One choice facing policymakers is whether to tightly specify the innovations they seek (a “Conventional” approach) or to allow firms to suggest ideas (an “Open” approach). We exploit a natural experiment in...

This paper documents several new facts about the relationship between discrimination and political exclusion and the motivation to fight in wartime. The Pearl Harbor attack triggered a sharp increase in volunteer enlistment rates of American men, the magnitude of the increase was smaller for...

We examine whether exposure of men to women in a traditionally male-dominated environment can change attitudes about mixed-gender productivity, gender roles and gender identity. Our context is the military in Norway, where we randomly assigned female recruits to some squads but not others during...

This study estimates the effect of deployment location and length on the risk of developing PTSD, relative to what it would be from the normal military operations. We use a random sample of activity-duty enlisted personnel serving between 2001 and 2006. We identify PTSD cases from TRICARE...

Although the Civil War has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, little is known about how different wartime experiences of soldiers influenced their civilian lives after the war. This paper examines how military rank and duty of Union Army soldiers while in service affected their...

This paper investigates patterns of socioeconomic difference in the wartime morbidity and mortality of black Union Army soldiers. Among the factors that contributed to a lower probability of contracting and dying from diseases were (1) lighter skin color, (2) a non-field occupation, (3)...

We show a statistically significant and quantitatively meaningful decline in the intelligence of Marine Officers from 1980 to 2014 as measured by their scores on the General Classification Test (GCT) which has been shown to be a good predictor of success in the military. This contrasts with the...

A combination of voluntary enlistment, armed forces eligibility criteria, and the failure of draftees to avoid conscription jointly determined the racial composition of the Vietnam-era armed forces. Administrative data show that men with draft lottery numbers that put them at high risk of...

A relatively obscure defense procurement policy establishes a large subsidy to private military R&D investment. On the surface, it appears that the marginal subsidy to such investment is zero, but this is only true in the short run. Due to DOD's policy of allowable-cost determination, the...