Essays measuring dollar-fatality tradeoffs and other human costs of war in World War II and Vietnam.

摘要

This dissertation consists of three essays measuring human costs associated with military actions. Chapter 1 applies the economic concept of the value of a statistical life to the field of national defense. Using a unique battle-level dataset, I measure the value that the United States government placed on soldiers' lives in World War II. Tank-intensive units were expensive in dollars, but troop-intensive units put more human targets on the battlefield. I find that, holding mission accomplishment constant, the Army could have reduced fatalities by increasing its use of tanks and decreasing its use of ground troops. While imprecise, my preferred estimates suggest that this policy would have cost roughly ;In Chapter 2, I measure the willingness to pay to avoid military service among young men in the Vietnam Era. I compare the Vietnam draft's effects on college attendance with tuition's effects on college attendance. I then measure how much tuition would have to be lowered to generate the same increase in schooling as the Vietnam draft generated. Through this comparison, I express in dollar units young men's willingness to pay to avoid military service. In 2003 dollars, I estimate that young men were willing to pay roughly ;In Chapter 3, I use the Vietnam draft lottery as a natural experiment to measure the effects of military service on incarcerations. For some cohorts, I find that the incarceration rate is slightly higher than average among men whose lottery numbers were called during Vietnam. In general, however, the Vietnam draft's effects on incarcerations appear to have been small and insignificant, even after adjusting for the draft's effects on education.