Uncle Sam Wants Whom? The Draft and the Quality of Military Personnel

It has been argued the draft may enable the military to attract more able individuals than a volunteer military and thus increase welfare. We find this may be the case if a volunteer military simply takes the least able individuals. Ignoring the deadweight loss from taxation, when the military tests individuals, does not take the lowest quality applicants, and the test is costless and accurate, neither a random draft nor a draft with testing increases welfare, and both usually decrease welfare. Only if testing is relatively costly or imprecise would a random draft dominate a volunteer military with testing. With either a low quality volunteer military or imprecise testing, a volunteer military is more likely to be preferable to a draft the larger the size of the military. The opposite is the case with either costly testing or deadweight loss from taxation to support the military. Key Words: conscription, volunteer military, testing

Spence Revisited: Signaling and the Allocation of Individuals to Jobs

Spence (1974a) considered a variant of his signaling model in which there are two types of jobs, and in which signaling can increase wealth by improving the allocation of individuals to jobs. Using results in signaling games since Spence’s work---the Riley outcome (Riley, 1979), the intuitive criterion (Cho and Kreps, 1987), and undefeated equilibrium (Mailath et al., 1993)---it is possible to be more precise than Spence was in determining when signaling would occur and what the effect of signaling on wealth would be. We find the likelihood of efficient signaling, inefficient signaling, and pooling equilibria depends on the fraction of more able individuals in the population. With non-trivial gains from job allocation, inefficient signaling does not appear to be the most likely outcome. Key Words: signaling, pooling, Riley outcome, intuitive criterion, and undefeated equilibrium

Can A Draft Induce More Human Capital Investment in the Military?

We consider the possibility a draft increases the likelihood individuals will invest in human capital in the military. This possibility exists because those drafted have less time to reap the return from human capital investment. A draft is more likely to increase human capital investment in the military the larger the civilian return to human capital investment, the shorter the additional time one must spend in the military if one invests while enlisted, and the larger the cost to an individual of obtaining a deferment. Key Words: Conscription, volunteer military, and human capital

How Might Adam Smith Pay Professors Today?

Adam Smith’s proposal for paying professors was intended to induce increased faculty knowledge. If students have imperfect information about what they learn, and universities can only imperfectly measure the input of faculty time in student learning, publications may be used to measure faculty knowledge. If professors’ ability to publish is positively related to their ability to produce student learning, which universities can imperfectly measure, publications may be necessary to attract more able professors. Since research signals faculty knowledge, schools that do not value publications per se could require higher publication standards and pay higher wages than schools that value only publications.

A Competitive Model of (Super)Stars

The usual explanations for superstar effects---when a firm’s revenue is positive and convex in quality, and a few firms earn a large share of market revenue---are imperfect substitution between sellers, low marginal cost of output, and marginal cost declining as quality increases. Herein, a competitive model is developed in which superstar effects occur simply because a few firms have quality significantly higher than others. No firm needs to sell more than a small percentage of market output, and cost can increase in output and in quality (the latter possibly at no more than a decreasing rate).

Parametric Connectives in Disjunctive Logic Programming

Disjunctive Logic Programming (\DLP) is an advanced formalism for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR). \DLP is very expressive in a precise mathematical sense: it allows to express every property of finite structures that is decidable in the complexity class \SigmaP{2} (\NP^{\NP}). Importantly, the \DLP encodings are often simple and natural. In this paper, we single out some limitations of \DLP for KRR, which cannot naturally express problems where the size of the disjunction is not known ``a priori'' (like N-Coloring), but it is part of the input. To overcome these limitations, we further enhance the knowledge modelling abilities of \DLP, by extending this language by {\em Parametric Connectives (OR and AND)}. These connectives allow us to represent compactly the disjunction/conjunction of a set of atoms having a given property. We formally define the semantics of the new language, named $DLP^{\bigvee,\bigwedge}$ and we show the usefulness of the new constructs on relevant knowledge-based problems. We address implementation issues and discuss related works

The Economics of US Civil War Conscription

The US government had limited power during the Civil War, including an inability to tax income. Similar to conscription plans considered in the War of 1812, Civil War conscription was not intended to compel service, but was a second-best plan to shift the tax burden to state and local governments. The time allowed communities to provide volunteers after a federal call for enlistments, along with substitution and the payment of a fee to avoid service (commutation), meant few were actually drafted---about 2% of all who served. Commutation could have lowered social cost, but appears to have been a binding ceiling on the price of a substitute.