Women at War: Understanding the Impacts of Combat on Women’s Educational Attainment

Laura Armey

Defence and Peace Economics, 2020, vol. 31, issue 1, 34-47

Abstract: This paper offers a first view on the potential economic outcomes for American women serving along-side men in combat roles. Specifically, this paper examines the impact of deployment and exposure to intense combat for women who served in the most high-risk occupations open to them in Iraq and Afghanistan on their subsequent use of GI bill benefits for higher education. It also compares these women to men who served in the same capacities and women who served in lower risk occupations. Women in general, and in these occupations in particular, were more likely than their male counterparts to use the GI bill. Following deployment, this paper presents robust evidence that women in all capacities, and men, were more likely to use their GI bill benefits. Moreover, exposure to intense combat, which was far more likely to impact these women than other women, detracted from their propensity to use the GI bill. This negative impact on pursuit of higher education was similar for both men and women. Taken together, this paper provides evidence that deployment may benefit the young men and women alike who serve in the U.S. military, and that both suffer together when faced with exposure to intense fighting.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10242694.2018.1467104 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:defpea:v:31:y:2020:i:1:p:34-47

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/GDPE20

DOI: 10.1080/10242694.2018.1467104

Access Statistics for this article

Defence and Peace Economics is currently edited by Professor Keith Hartley

More articles in Defence and Peace Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().