Is the pay responsiveness of enlisted personnel decreasing?

Abstract

An examination of past analyses suggests that today's sailors may be less responsive to compensation changes than previous generations. Such a change could make recruiting and retaining high-quality sailors more difficult. However, variation in researchers' decisions over time may simply have created the appearance of such a change. Our results suggest there is little variation in the pay elasticity over time. In contrast, the different reduced-form models we use to measure this relationship can explain most of the variation in the literature. Therefore, the evidence suggests that while sailors may have changed over time, their response to compensation has not.Pay elasticity, Reenlistment, Compensation,