aging and inequality in income and health in our earlier work we used data from the national health interview survey nhis to examine life cycle patterns in health status and in the joint distribution of health status and income deaton and paxson 1998 in this paper we summarize and extend those results and provide new evidence from the panel study of income dynamics psid both surveys contain a measure of household income and collect information on an ordinal measures of self reported health status srhs that ranges from 1 excellent to 5 poor section i concerns problems related to the measurement of inequality in health section ii presents evidence from the two surveys on health and income inequality this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

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

the shape of public choice to come some predictions and advice in the normal course of events elders are sometimes called upon to reflect on the past while the more youthful set about deciding the future for the most part i shall honor the dictum but offer some unsolicited advice on what needs to be done and be so bold as to predict these suggestions will be acted upon a kind of self fulfilling prophecy of course the advice may be rejected or ignored what then

taking versus taxing an analysis of conscription in a private information economy most countries currently man their militaries through conscription i e a draft conventional wisdom suggests that by lowering the budgetary cost of the military a draft reduces distortionary taxation especially when military needs are large we find that this intuition is misguided when income taxes are set optimally voluntary enlistments lead to less distortionary taxation than a draft because the tax base left behind by a volunteer army tends to be more productive than that after a draft for reasonable parameter values drafts are more distortionary and less socially desirable when military needs are large

the long term impact of military service on health evidence from world war ii and korean war veterans during the world war ii and korean war era the u s military freely distributed cigarettes to overseas personnel and provided low cost tobacco products on domestic military bases in fact even today the military continues to sell subsidized tobacco products on its bases using a variety of instrumental variables approaches to deal with nonrandom selection into the military and into smoking we provide substantial evidence that cohorts with higher military participation rates subsequently suffered more premature mortality more importantly we show that a large fraction 35 to 79 percent of the excess veteran deaths due to heart disease and lung cancer are attributable to military induced smoking

long term consequences of vietnam era conscription new estimates using social security data we use the draft lottery to construct instrumental variables iv estimates of the impact of vietnam era military service on veterans social security ssa earnings through 2007 we also use ssa data to construct iv estimates for employment as measured by an indicator for positive earnings and disability status as measured by an indicator for social security disability program application new findings for recent years show surprisingly rapid convergence in veteran and nonveteran earnings by the early 1990s there was no longer a substantial vietnam era conscription penalty the iv estimates also show no effect on employment or disability rates

a theory of strategic voting in runoff elections abstract this paper analyzes the properties of runoff electoral systems when voters are strategic a model of three candidate runoff elections is presented and two new features are included the risk of upset victory in the second round is endogenous and many types of runoff systems are considered three main results emerge first runoff elections produce equilibria in which only two candidates receive a positive fraction of the votes second a sincere voting equilibrium does not always exist finally runoff systems with a threshold below 50 percent produce an ortega effect that may lead to the systematic victory of the condorcet loser jel c72 d72

going to college to avoid the draft the unintended legacy of the vietnam war between 1965 and 1975 the enrollment rate of college age men in the united states rose and then fell abruptly many contemporary observers e g james davis and kenneth dolbeare 1968 attributed the surge in college attendance to draft avoidance behavior under a policy first introduced in the korean war the selective service issued college deferments to enrolled men that delayed their eligibility for conscription these deferments provided a strong incentive to remain in school for men who wanted to avoid the draft for example the college entry rate of young men rose from 54 percent in 1963 to 62 percent in 1968 the peak year of the draft moreover both the college entry rate and the number of inductions dropped sharply between 1968 and 1973 as the draft was being phased out although these parallel trends are suggestive they do not necessarily prove that draft avoidance raised the education of men who were at risk of service during the vietnam war such an inference requires an explicit specification of the counterfactual what would have happened to schooling outcomes in the absence of the draft in this paper we use trends in enrollment and completed schooling of men relative to those of women to measure the effects of draftavoidance behavior during the vietnam war our maintained hypothesis is that in the absence of gender specific factors such as the draft the relative schooling outcomes of men and women from the same cohort would follow a smooth trend in light of the sharp discontinuity in military induction rates between 1965 and 1970 we look for similar patterns in the relative enrollment rate of men and in the relative college graduation rate of men from cohorts that were at risk of induction during this period

demand for education and labor market outcomes lessons from the abolition of compulsory conscription in france before 1997 education was a way for young french men to avoid military service in the army after the abolition of compulsory conscription in 1997 this incentive to stay on in education disappeared we show that the decrease in the benefit of pursuing education for men was followed by a fall in their educational achievement relative to women and by a decrease in their relative entry wages these results suggest that high school dropout rates could be reduced by policies increasing the immediate benefits of pursuing education and that it would yield a substantial improvement in early labor market outcomes

who votes in latin america a test of three theoretical perspectives previous studies of electoral participation in latin america have focused on the political and institutional factors that influence country differences in the aggregate level of turnout this article provides a theoretical and empirical examination of the individual level factors that have an impact on citizens propensity to vote we test three theoretical perspectives that have been used to explain electoral participation in industrialized democracies voters resources voters motivations and mobilization networks using a series of logistic and hierarchical models we demonstrate that the demographic characteristics of voters age and education and citizens insertion in mobilizing networks civic organizations and the working place are strong predictors of electoral participation in latin america our analysis also confirms the importance of contextual and institutional variables to explain turnout in the region

rational choice and turnout turning out to vote is the most common and important act of political participation in any democracy voting is also less well understood and explained empirically than other political acts engaged in regularly by citizens turnout however presents a special problem for rational choice theories of politics for it is taken to be the paradigmatic example of the problem of collective action in which although all may benefit from voting it is rarely in the individual s self interest to vote this paper begins by examining the problem of explaining turnout a basic form of rational choice models of turnout is developed basic in the sense that it is common to all such models this basic model is shown to be incomplete and the two most important models the calculus of voting and the minimax regret model are illustrated as alternative ways to complete this basic model along with mention of game theoretic models their strengths and weaknesses are then assessed the remainder of the paper argues that rational choice accounts of turnout are possible the first step is to argue that turnout is not an especially problematic version of the collective action problem because it is for many a low cost low expected benefit decision a strategic politicians account of turnout and campaigns is examined next a reinterpretation of the intrinsic benefits of voting is then considered and is used to examine the most important substantive problem in the turnout literature its decline these steps i argue make theories of ordinary political decisions at once both more political and more integrated into the politics of the larger system

lifetime earnings and the vietnam era draft lottery evidence from social security administrative records errata the randomly assigned risk of induction generated by the draft lottery is used to construct estimates of the effect of veteran status on civilian earnings these estimates are not biased by the fact that certain types of men are more likely than others to service in the military social security administrative records indicate that in the early 1980s long after their service in vietnam had ended the earnings of white veterans were approximately 15 percent less than the earnings of comparable nonveterans copyright 1990 by american economic association

military service and human capital accumulation evidence from colonial punjab this paper estimates the impact of military recruitment during world war i on human capital accumulation in colonial punjab the empirical strategy exploits the exogenous increase in recruitment by the indian army during the war higher military recruitment is found to be associated with increased literacy at the district religion level the observed improvement in the human capital stock appears to be driven by the informal acquisition of literacy skills by serving soldiers

the relationship between education and adult mortality in the united states prior research has uncovered a large and positive correlation between education and health this paper examines whether education has a causal impact on health i follow synthetic cohorts using successive u s censuses to estimate the impact of educational attainment on mortality rates i use compulsory education laws from 1915 to 1939 as instruments for education the results suggest that education has a causal impact on mortality and that this effect is perhaps larger than has been previously estimated in the literature copyright 2005 wiley blackwell

rural urban disparities in india and china abstract this paper compares rural urban disparities in china and india in light of differences in the following indicators income and consumption deposit to credit ratios and agricultural and industrial productivity access to such public services as health are also considered reasons for disparities are sought in government policies affecting agricultural terms of trade credit and rural to urban migration the paper concludes that the chinese economy during the mao zedong period was much more egalitarian than the indian but the case is less clearcut for the deng xiaoping period

conscription and the returns to education evidence from a regression discontinuity in 1997 the french government put into effect a law that permanently exempted young french male citizens born after jan 1 1979 from mandatory military service while still requiring those born before that cutoff date to serve this paper uses a regression discontinuity design to identify the effect of peacetime conscription on education and labor market outcomes results indicate that conscription eligibility induces a significant increase in years of education which is consistent with conscription avoidance behavior however this increased education does not result in either an increase in graduation rates or in employment and wages additional evidence shows conscription has no direct effect on earnings suggesting that the returns to education induced by this policy was zero

towards an appraisal of the impact of rural reform in china 1978 85 china s economic institutions have been radically transformed since 1978 the most dramatic changes have been in the countryside where a virtual de collectivisation has taken place see nolan 1983 with profound direct effects on the 800 million rural dwellers as well as important implications for china s 200 odd million urban population 1 the significance of these changes goes beyond china s boundaries their self evident success in stimulating output growth must lead to a wide ranging reassessment of the appropriateness of collective institutions in agriculture it is no surprise that a delegation of soviet economists in china early in 1985 showed special interest in the agricultural reforms in contemporary china official policy changes so fast as to render obsolete any appraisal of their prospective consequences and to make forecasts somewhat akin to astrology and given the severely incomplete while rapidly improving statistical base analysis of the past still borders on archaeology nonetheless evidence from a wide range of sources both official and informal as well as written oral and visual is sufficient to construct a reasonably comprehensive picture of the impact of the agricultural reforms of 1978 83 this article examines two main issues the first section looks at some important indicators of the performance of the rural economy and considers some of the main factors that have affected it the second section examines the impact of the reforms on inequality and poverty in the countryside

did vietnam veterans get sicker in the 1990s the complicated effects of military service on self reported health abstract the veterans disability compensation vdc program which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans is the third largest american disability insurance program since the late 1990s vdc growth has been driven primarily by an increase in claims from vietnam veterans raising concerns about costs as well as health we use the draft lottery to study the long term effects of vietnam era military service on health and work in the 2000 census we find no evidence that military service affected overall employment rates or overall work limiting disability rates that is health conditions that make work difficult at the same time military service sharply increased federal transfer income especially for lower skilled white men among whom there was also a large negative impact on employment and a marked increase in disability rates the differential impact of vietnam era service on low skilled men cannot be explained by more combat or war theatre exposure for the least educated because high school graduates were at least as likely to be exposed to combat or war theatre as the less educated this leaves the relative attractiveness of vdc for less skilled men and the work disincentives embedded in the vdc system as a likely explanation for our findings

college education and the midcentury gi bills the midcentury gi bills were the largest direct scholarship program for higher education in american history i use a comparison group created by the sharp cutoff date of the korean war gi bill to evaluate the effects of the korean war gi bill on postsecondary educational attainment and access to college by the disadvantaged i then bound the likely effects of the world war ii gi bill based on elasticities estimated for the korean war gi bill and new estimates using older veterans as a comparison group for younger ones i find that the combination of the korean war and wwii gi bills probably increased total postsecondary attainment among all men born between 1921 and 1933 by about 15 to 20 percent with smaller effects for surrounding cohorts the impacts of both programs on college attainment were apparently concentrated among veterans from families in the upper half of the distribution of socioeconomic status

distinguishing income from substitution effects in disability insurance a set of studies conducted over the last 15 years has produced a near consensus that the social security disability insurance system ssdi has substantial disincentive effects on the labor supply of near elderly males diminishing labor force participation increasing the sensitivity of labor force exit decisions to adverse economic shocks and encouraging those nearing retirement to claim disability benefits and subsequently transfer into the social security retirement program yet efforts by the social security administration ssa to encourage labor supply among the disabled by removing the work disincentives built into ssdi have been almost entirely unsuccessful most notably in 1999 congress authorized the ticket to work program which provides an array of inducements for current ssdi beneficiaries to take up employment including permitting a trial work period of up to nine months providing 7 75 years of ongoing medicare eligibility following return to work and providing three years of automatic benefit reinstatement when claimants workplace earnings fall below a threshold level each of these steps reduces the implicit tax placed on labor supply by the ssdi program despite these lures fewer than 1 400 0 01 percent of the 12 2 million tickets issued to date have led to successful workforce integration autor and duggan 2006

on the inefficient extraction of rents by dictators most countries in the world are governed by autocracy that is some form of one man rule be it monarchy or dictatorship dictatorship is a prevalent form of autocracy with a majority of the world s population living under this type of rule yet when analyzed from an economic point of view dictatorships do not appear to be efficient they are not efficient in social terms and more strangely they do not appear to be efficient from the dictator s viewpoint take one example in bulandia a fictitious country a general from the army overthrows the government and establishes himself as the supreme leader he promptly places those who helped him in the revolution in key government positions as well as granting them favors in the business world such positions and favors are considered rewards for supporting the revolution they can be considered a cost of the revolution suppose the general appoints his brother an air force colonel as head of the newly established national mining industry his brother having no background in business or engineering is to say the least not the most qualified man for the job but it is assumed that he must be granted the position in order to maintain a stable coalition he must be paid off if this is the only problem the payoff why does the dictator use such an inefficient method of pay off why doesn t he for example have the industry managed by a foreign mining company which can actually generate profits and then use these profits to

television and voter turnout i use variation across markets in the timing of television s introduction to identify its impact on voter turnout the estimated effect is significantly negative accounting for between a quarter and a half of the total decline in turnout since the 1950s i argue that substitution away from other media with more political coverage provides a plausible mechanism linking television to voting as evidence for this i show that the entry of television in a market coincided with sharp drops in consumption of newspapers and radio and in political knowledge as measured by election surveys i also show that both the information and turnout effects were largest in off year congressional elections which receive extensive coverage in newspapers but little or no coverage on television

social and economic determinants of english voter choice in the 1997 general election using a theoretical framework in which voters choices are the result of utility maximisation decisions and in which the variation of utility functions across individuals is partly deterministic depending on their socio economic characteristics and partly stochastic we estimate constituency level regression equations to explain how the electoral shares of each of the main parties depend on conditions in the constituency whilst social characteristics ap pear to have an impact similar to that predicted in the existing literature economic conditions appear to have played a very different role in 1997 from in previous elections

the health effects of military service evidence from the vietnam draft i introduction the impact of military service on long term health is reemerging as a vital policy question as the united states conducts major military operations in iraq and afghanistan health professionals have raised concerns that significant numbers of the veterans of these conflicts are experiencing psychological and physical health problems the department of veterans affairs estimates that anywhere from 12 to 20 of servicemen returning from iraq suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder which the medical literature suggests can have a long term adverse effect on an individual s health in the 2005 fiscal year the department of veterans affairs spent about 32 billion dollars on medical care for veterans a substantial liability for the american taxpayer thus understanding the long term health impacts of military service is important both for allocating treatment resources and for correctly estimating the cost of waging these two wars comparing the health of veterans with that of nonveterans may not give us credible estimates of the effect of military service people voluntarily enlisting in the military differ in their observable characteristics from those who do not these observable differences between veterans and nonveterans leave us concerned that cross sectional estimates of the long term health consequences of military service will be biased by systematic differences in the unobservable characteristics of the two groups for this reason we use the draft lottery implemented during the vietnam war as an instrument for military service the draft lottery required randomly selected men born between 1944 and 1952 to report for possible induction into the military we use confidential versions of the 19742004 national health interview surveys nhis 1 to examine the impact of military service on veterans health we focus on the 67 608 men who were born between 1950 and 1952 because as we document this is the cohort most affected by the vietnam draft lottery we begin with a cross sectional comparison of veterans and nonveterans which reveals that veterans are in systematically worse health than nonveterans and that these health disparities increase with age these estimates probably overstate the causal effect of military service because veterans differ systematically from nonveterans on dimensions such as education that are strongly associated with adverse health when we correct for this problem using draft status to instrument for military service we find that despite a very strong first stage relationship between draft eligibility and military service the 2 stage least squares 2sls estimates of the impact of military service on health are fairly imprecise for most of the outcomes we examine the confidence intervals from the 2sls regressions containing both zero and the point estimate from the cross sectional regression this paper makes two contributions to the literature first unlike the cross sectional literature on the impact of military service on health the instrumental variables approach used in this paper provides unbiased estimates second this paper documents that though the vietnam lottery very significantly increased military service it led to only a modest increase in combat exposure 2 in the following section we discuss the existing literature on veterans health and on the impact of the vietnam era draft in section iii we describe our primary data source the nhis in section iv we discuss the research methodology and some of the issues that complicate the use of draft eligibility as an instrument section v discusses our results and section vi concludes ii previous literature there is a significant literature documenting the disproportionate prevalence of health problems among military veterans hoge et al 2004 find that mental health problems are common in veterans who served in iraq and afghanistan

healthy bodies and thick wallets the dual relation between health and economic status there is abundant evidence of a quantitatively large association between many measures of economic status including income and wealth and a variety of health outcomes such as mortality or morbidity however considerable and often heated debate remains especially across disciplines about the direction of causation and about why the association arises although medical scientists are often convinced that the dominant if not exclusive pathway is that variation in socioeconomic status produces health disparities they are increasingly debating among themselves about why low economic status might lead to poor health at least for modern industrial countries 1 the old standby arguments the less well to do have access to less or lower quality medical care or a stronger pattern of deleterious personal behaviors have been rejected as insufficient instead a series of intriguing competing theories have arisen that emphasize long term impacts of early childhood or even inter uterine environmental factors the cumulative effects of prolonged exposures to individual stressful events or reactions to macro societal factors such as rising levels of income inequality a common link is that each theory attempts to document the physiological processes through which low economic status leads to poorer health while these scientific questions are extremely important this research has taken place with little input from economists economists are now making contributions about the alternative pathway the impact poor health may have on economic resources poor health may restrict a family s capacity to earn income or to accumulate assets by limiting work or by raising medical expenses at a minimum this work should provide a caution against exaggerating the magnitude of causation from economic status to health outcomes but the potential contribution runs deeper as people age the evolving variation in individual health outcomes may offer additional statistical information to estimate parameters of household savings and consumption behavior that so far have proven to be somewhat elusive thus incorporating health uncertainty and risk into economic models should eventually enrich our understanding of basic tenets of household behavior the first section of this paper documents the size of the association between health and one prominent economic status measure household wealth section two deals with how health influences economic status by sketching out reasons why health may alter household savings and eventually wealth and then providing estimates of the empirical magnitude of these effects section three shifts attention to the alternative pathway the links between economic status and health and summarizes 2major controversies and evidence surrounding these issues

military service and political behavior evidence from france abstract we investigate the impact of compulsory military service on turnout and political preferences exploiting the suspension of mandatory conscription for french men we observe a significant and positive impact of military service on turnout we estimate that the service increases turnout by approximately 7 percentage points we also investigate the impact of conscription on political preferences when we control for selection into the military service we observe no support for a change in preferences of former conscripts

if people vote because they like to then why do so many of them lie of those eligible about 40 do not vote in presidential elections when asked about a quarter of those nonvoters will lie to the survey takers and claim that they did increases in education are associated with higher voting rates and lower rates of lying overall but with increased rates of lying conditional on not voting this paper proposes a model of voter turnout in which people who claim to vote get praise from other citizens those who lie must bear the cost of lying the model has a stable equilibrium with positive rates of voting honest non voting and lying reasonable parameter changes produce changes in these proportions in the same direction as the changes actually observed across education levels i argue that a model where people vote because they want to be known as voters provides a better explanation for observed voting behavior than does a model where people vote because they want to vote

gun prevalence and suicide abstract in light of the ongoing debate over tighter firearm regulations this paper considers the relationship between gun prevalence and suicide i exploit a reform in switzerland that reduced the prevalence of military issued guns in private households in switzerland military service is compulsory for men and military issued guns account for nearly half of the total number of firearms available the results show that the firearm suicide rate decreases by 9 for a reduction in gun prevalence of 1000 guns per 100 000 inhabitants the elasticity of gun suicides with respect to firearm prevalence is 0 48 but converges towards zero for low levels of gun prevalence the overall suicide rate is negatively and significantly related to firearm prevalence which indicates that non gun methods of suicide are not perfect replacements for firearms

who will vote quadratically voter turnout and votes cast under quadratic voting who will vote quadratically in large n elections under quadratic voting qv first who will vote although the core qv literature assumes that everyone votes turnout is endogenous drawing on other work we consider the representativeness of endogenously determined turnout under qv second who will vote quadratically conditional on turning out we examine reasons that in large n elections the number of votes that an individual casts may deviate substantially from that under pure rational qv equilibrium play because turnout itself is driven by other factors the same determinants may influence how voters who do turn out choose the quantity of votes to cast independently the number of votes actually cast may deviate dramatically from pure qv predictions because of the complex and refined nature of equilibrium play most plausibly voting behavior and outcomes would be determined predominately by social and psychological forces would exhibit few of the features emphasized in the analysis of hyper rational equilibrium play and would have consequential properties that require a different research agenda to bring into focus some of our analysis also has implications for voting behavior under other procedures including one person one vote