No Kin In The Game: Moral Hazard and War in the U.S. Congress

Eoin McGuirk, Nathaniel Hilger and Nicholas Miller

No 23904, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study agency frictions in the United States Congress. We examine the longstanding hypothesis that political elites engage in conflict because they fail to internalize the associated costs. We compare the voting behavior of legislators with draft age sons versus draft age daughters during the conscription-era wars of the 20th century. We estimate that having a draft age son reduces pro-conscription voting by 7-11 percentage points. Support for conscription recovers when a legislator’s son ages out of eligibility. We establish that agency problems contribute to political conflict and that politicians are influenced by private incentives orthogonal to political concerns or ideological preferences.

JEL-codes: N42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cta, nep-his, nep-pol and nep-sea
Note: DAE PE POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Eoin F. McGuirk & Nathaniel Hilger & Nicholas Miller, 2023. "No Kin in the Game: Moral Hazard and War in the US Congress," Journal of Political Economy, vol 131(9), pages 2370-2401.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23904.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: No Kin in the Game: Moral Hazard and War in the US Congress (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23904

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23904

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().