The Labor Market Earnings of Veterans: Is Military Experience More or Less Valuable than Civilian Experience?

Christos Makridis and Barry Hirsch ()

Journal of Labor Research, 2021, vol. 42, issue 3, No 1, 303-333

Abstract: Abstract We assess the labor market experiences and earnings of military veterans, focusing on three major outcomes, among others, controlling for a wide array of demographic characteristics and industry and occupational fixed effects. First, we find that male and female veterans receive civilian earnings nearly equivalent to nonveteran men and women. This finding implies that military experience is valued in the labor market similarly to foregone civilian experience. Second, veterans are clustered in occupations with somewhat lower than average employment and real earnings growth, and in metropolitan areas with lower levels and growth of real GDP per capita. Third, veterans experience lower returns to formal educational investments (e.g., college) than do nonveterans. Veterans realize earnings gains from professional licenses, but their returns are lower than for nonveterans. These gains are concentrated among science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs, suggesting that veterans could help meet the growing demand for tech talent and artificial intelligence skills.

Keywords: Military veterans; Earnings levels and dispersion; Work experience; Licensing; Public sector; Occupation growth; J3 Wages; compensation; and labor costs; J4 Particular labor markets; J44 Professional labor markets and occupational licensing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12122-021-09321-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Labor Market Earnings of Veterans: Is Military Experience More or Less Valuable than Civilian Experience? (2021)
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:spr:jlabre:v:42:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s12122-021-09321-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/12122

DOI: 10.1007/s12122-021-09321-y

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Labor Research is currently edited by Ozkan Eren

More articles in Journal of Labor Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().