Who Will Fight? The All-Volunteer Army after 9/11
American Economic Review
vol. 107,
no. 5, May 2017
(pp. 415-19)
Abstract
Who fought the War on Terror? We find that as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan progressed, there was an increase in the fraction of active-duty Army enlistees who were white or from high-income neighborhoods and that these two groups selected combat occupations more often. Among men, we find an increase in deployment and combat injuries for white and Hispanic soldiers relative to black soldiers and for soldiers from high-income neighborhoods relative to those from low-income neighborhoods. This finding suggests that an all-volunteer force does not compel a disproportionate number of non-white and low socio-economic men to fight America's wars.Citation
Carter, Susan Payne, Alexander A. Smith, and Carl Wojtaszek. 2017. "Who Will Fight? The All-Volunteer Army after 9/11." American Economic Review, 107 (5): 415-19. DOI: 10.1257/aer.p20171082Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- H56 National Security and War
- J15 Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
- J45 Public Sector Labor Markets