Dynamic Costs of the Draft

Lau Morten I., Panu Poutvaara and Andreas Wagener
Additional contact information
Lau Morten I.: Center for Economic Business Research (CEBR),Copenhagen, Denmark

German Economic Review, 2004, vol. 5, issue 4, 381-406

Abstract: We propose a dynamic general-equilibrium model with human capital accumulation to evaluate the economic consequences of compulsory services (such as military draft or social work). Our analysis identifies a so far ignored dynamic cost arising from distortions in time allocation over the life cycle.We provide conservative estimates for the excess burden that arises when the government relies on forced labor rather than on income taxation to finance public expenditures. Our results suggest that eliminating the draft could produce considerable dynamic gains, both in terms of GDP and lifetime utility.

Keywords: Conscription; time allocation; distortionary taxation; computable general-equilibrium models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-6485.2004.00114.x (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Journal Article: Dynamic Costs of the Draft (2004)
Working Paper: Dynamic costs of the draft (2004)
Working Paper: The Dynamic Cost of the Draft (2002)
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:bpj:germec:v:5:y:2004:i:4:p:381-406

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ger/html

DOI: 10.1111/j.1465-6485.2004.00114.x

Access Statistics for this article

German Economic Review is currently edited by Peter Egger, Almut Balleer, Jesus Crespo-Cuaresma, Mario Larch, Aderonke Osikominu and Georg Wamser

More articles in German Economic Review from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().