The Effects of Compulsory Military Serving on the Individual Financial Behavior, Future Earnings and Employment Status

Student: Kopytok Vitovt

Educational Programme: Economics: Research Programme (Master)

Year of Graduation: 2018

This paper investigates the effects of compulsory military serving in Russia on the financial behavior of the conscripts and on their future outcomes in the labor market: cumulative earnings, average wages and employment status. Based on the longitudinal data from RLMS we provide new evidence on the long-term impacts of peacetime conscription in labor market for men serve in Russian army. To receive the causal estimation, we explore a kink in the date-of-birth profile of the risk to be drafted to army for men that happened because of the demilitarization process initiated in 1988 by Mikhail Gorbachev. We apply a Regression Kink Design (RK) approach to identify this causal inference. The compulsory military service results in the 3-7 decrease of the annual average wage for conscripts. The effect on the employment and income is not clearly identified.

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