Military service is a popular method of army recruitment for governments of developing countries that are particularly prone to conflict. This study contributes to the largely under-researched issues of military service by looking at an unintended consequence of a military service exemption policy and answering a principal question: is there a fear of conscription among the youth? It uses a discontinuity in the military service law in an under-researched country, Iran, and offers causal evidence that fear of conscription entices young men to get more education against their will. This exogenous increase is used to estimate returns to education.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.