The Military as an Institution for the Development of Human Capital

Abstract

Since the establishment of the all-volunteer force in the United States, the impact of military service on service members has been a critical policy consideration. While earlier research focuses on the negative economic returns to conscription (Imbens and Klaauw, 1995; Angrist, 1990) newer studies underscore the positive returns to volunteer service (Greenberg et al., 2022). This dissertation helps to understand these outcomes by analyzing the mechanisms of human capital development within the U.S. military, focusing on mentorship, training, and personnel assessment. In the first chapter, I leverage an established identification strategy (Lyle and Smith, 2014; Carter et al., 2019) where first-term enlisted soldiers are conditionally randomly assigned to specific supervisors. By analyzing Army ratings data, I show that junior officers learn about 10% of their management style from their initial supervisors. The second chapter explores how military assignments influence geographic mobility. By leveraging quasi-random assignment of a soldier’s first duty station (Carter and Swisher, 2020), I estimate that soldiers assigned away from their home regions are about 5 percentage points more likely to undertake long-distance moves after service with initial evidence suggesting this mobility correlates with increased future income. In chapter three, I analyze shortcomings in subjective performance ratings using a unique longitudinal dataset. After correcting for individual fixed effects, I am able to identify precise biases in ratings. I conclude by using simulation techniques to recommend policy solutions to these problems.