Conscription as Regulation

By Casey B. Mulligan, A. Shleifer. 2005

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine the practice of military conscription around the world from the perspective of two standard theories, and a new one, which emphasizes the fixed cost of introducing and administering the draft as a deterrent to its use. We find that, holding the relative size of the military constant, higher population countries are more likely to use the draft. We also find that French legal origin countries, which we see as facing lower fixed and variable administrative costs, are more likely to draft than are common law countries. Conscription does not seem to be influenced by democracy, and is influenced by the deadweight costs of taxation only in countries with very large militaries. The results suggest that fixed costs of introducing and administering new regulations may be an important determinant of their use.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/74dba3509910278bf157657184eb3bb40ea57a13

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Citations in the corpus

Regulating away competition: the effect of regulation on entrepreneurship and employment (2017, unknown): “Previous work has tended to use cruder measures such as page counts (Coffey et al. 2012; Dawson and Seater 2013) or, in recent years, file-size data from state statutes (Mulligan and Shleifer 2005).”
Regulation and Distrust (2010, background): “Table 1 confirms these correlations in regressions controlling for the log per capita GDP, the average years of education, and population (Mulligan and Shleifer 2005).”