Selective Conscription: Sequential Allocation under Incomplete Information in Brazil's Military Recruitment and Retention System

Daniel Reiss

No 125/2026, Economics and Politics Working Paper Series from Economics and Politics Research Group (EPRG), University of Brasília

Abstract: The value of military service is often learned only through experience, yet initial selection into service must occur before that experience takes place. This creates a tension at the heart of every selective conscription system: the military must allocate positions among a large pool of potential recruits under imperfect information about both aptitude and preferences. Brazil, which registers over 1.5 million young men each year but incorporates only about 5 percent, is one of the largest selective systems in the world. Yet no formal framework models this process as a sequential allocation mechanism. This paper develops such a model, combining centralized screening, capacity constrained selection by military organizations, and post-service learning through reenlistment. Two results follow. First, the interaction between screening and capacity constraints endogenously generates local quasi-random assignment at the selection margin, providing an institutional micro-foundation for regression-discontinuity identification without requiring an explicit lottery. Second, when preferences are learned through experience, conditioning initial selection on stated willingness to serve is suboptimal for the formation of a high-quality retained force. As hybrid voluntary-mandatory designs return to the European policy agenda, these results offer analytical building blocks for the reform of conscription systems under uncertainty.

Keywords: conscription; military manpower; screening; incomplete information; regression discontinuity; Brazil (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 D86 H56 J24 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09-22
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://zenodo.org/api/records/23484449/files/eprg-wp-2026-125.pdf/content (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:gvn:eprgwp:1252026

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23484449

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics and Politics Working Paper Series from Economics and Politics Research Group (EPRG), University of Brasília
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Daniel Gersten Reiss ().