Enlistment Decisions in the 1990s: Evidence From Individual-Level Data

This work updates previous estimates of individual enlistment models, investigating the relationship bewteen family, individual, local labor market, and other background characcteristics and the decision to enlist. The study makes three primary innovations to earlier models. First, it uses data from the early 1990s, while the most recent estimates were from the early 1980s. The data report the enlistment behavior of a cohort of individuals from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) who were high school seniors in 1992. In general, the authors find that their coefficient estimates are similar to those estimated by earlier models, while the mean levels of the explanatory variables are more often significantly different from those in earlier data.