Seminar on ‘Causal Effect of Serving in Army on Health: Evidence from Regression Kink Design and Russian Data’

On March 17 a joint research seminar of the Laboratory for Labour Market Studies and the Centre for Labour Market Studies was held at HSE. Evgeny Yakovlev, Assistant Professor at the Department of Applied Economics delivered the report ‘Causal Effect of Serving in Army on Health: Evidence from Regression Kink Design and Russian Data’, co-authored by David Card (UC Berkeley and NBER).

On March 17 a joint research seminar of the Laboratory for Labour Market Studies and the Centre for Labour Market Studies was held at HSE. Evgeny Yakovlev, Assistant Professor at the Department of Applied Economics delivered the report ‘Causal Effect of Serving in Army on Health: Evidence from Regression Kink Design and Russian Data’, co-authored by David Card (UC Berkeley and NBER).

Abstract:

The paper estimates the causal effect on health of serving in the Russian Army. We explore a kink in the year-of-birth profile of the probability of compulsory service that happened as a result of the demilitarization process initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. We find that serving in the Russian Army significantly increases rates of alcohol consumption and smoking; it also results in a higher chance of getting hepatitis and tuberculosis, related to alcohol consumption and smoking chronic diseases and general health issues.