published in: American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2018, 10 (3), 101-127
This paper provides revealed-preference estimates of the monetary value of avoiding job search in a high-unemployment labor market by examining the behavior of military servicemembers deciding between reenlisting and exiting the military. We find that servicemembers would sacrifice 1.5-2% in earnings in exchange for avoiding a one percentage point increase in the home-state unemployment rate. Comparing these estimates to realized losses in post-service civilian earnings resulting from exiting the military during times of high unemployment suggests that mitigating factors (e.g., leisure, private and public transfers) offset less than one-third of the earnings losses caused by entering a weak labor market.
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.