Economics of National Security
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (PST)
- Chair: Eli Berman, University of California-San Diego
Does Free Community College Change Who Enlists in the Military? Qualitative and Quantitative Evidence from Tennessee Promise
Abstract
State and local college Promise programs that offer tuition-free community college are growing in number and scope in the United States. A Promise program may lead some students to enroll in college directly after high school rather than receive education benefits through military service and the GI Bill. We find qualitative and quantitative evidence of this substitution in Tennessee, where last-dollar tuition-free community college has been available to every high school graduate since 2015. Through 19 focus groups involving 60 total participants, we gathered student accounts of the importance of financial aid in their decision to go to college, and the effect that Tennessee Promise had on their decision to enlist versus enroll. Quantitative analyses support these sentiments. Using 2006-2019 data on all new military enlistments and a quasi-experimental research design that exploits the staggered introduction of Promise across counties, we find that tuition-free community college reduced a county’s total enlistments by about 28%, and that the composition of successful enlistees shifted towards those with more mechanical and automotive aptitude.Refugee Repatriation and Conflict: Evidence from the Maximum Pressure Sanctions
Abstract
How does refugee return shape conflict in destination communities? To study this question, we leverage the Trump Administration’s sudden withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, and the consequent re-imposition of sanctions on Iran in 2018. The so-called “Maximum Pressure” sanctions caused massive currency devaluation in Iran, decimating the economy and spurring the return of some 700,000 Afghan refugees from Iran to Afghanistan. Leveraging historical returnee settlement patterns and the plausibly exogenous timing of the sanctions, we estimate the causal effect of large-scale refugee repatriation on violence. We draw on previously unreleased combat records from NATO to show that mass return of Afghans from Iran increased insurgent-initiated violence in returnees’ destination communities. Currency devaluation pursuant to sanctions in Iran may have reduced Afghan household income, lowering reservation wages in communities where returnees repatriated. Consistent with this hypothesis, policy-induced return had heterogeneous effects on insurgent violence, increasing use and lethality of labor-intensive combat. Falling household income also reduced the cost of government tip-buying, improving the success of counterinsurgent bomb neutralization missions. While insurgent violence increased in repatriation communities, there was no effect on social conflict.The Economics of Civilian Victimization
Abstract
To what extent does variation in the cost of misbehavior - namely soldiers’ accountability - impact the frequency and severity of civilian victimization in armed conflicts? To answer this question, we study civilian killings by Axis soldiers during the Italian Campaign in World War II (July 1943 - May 1945). The German command attempted to contain indiscriminate violence against civilians for strate- gic reasons, but plausibly exogenous variation in the movement of front lines negatively shocked its enforcement capacity, thus reducing soldiers’ accountability. In a stacked difference-in-differences es- timation, we compare Axis troops’ behavior in treated municipalities that fell into the combat zone at frontline activation, with that of troops in comparison municipalities that remained either inside or out- side the combat zone. We find that the activation of a new frontline increased indiscriminate violence, such as collective killings, murders unrelated to partisan attacks and against vulnerable population, by 10 folds. The effect is concentrated in municipalities located away from divisions’ headquarters (where the German command’s enforcement capacity was, at baseline, weaker) and where bombing and parti- san presence were less intense (where Axis troops were safer), which provides further evidence in favor of an accountability mechanism. Crucially for policy, soldiers from less experienced units were more likely to change their behavior in response to a drop in accountability.JEL Classifications
- H5 - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies
- F5 - International Relations, National Security, and International Political Economy