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Article Excerpt
I. BACKGROUND
During the conflict in Vietnam, men between 18.5 and 25 yr of age were subject to the draft. Several exemptions to this rule existed. For example, students were exempt. Importantly for the purposes of this study, married men with dependents could also obtain a deferment from the draft, and the particulars of this policy underwent substantial changes in the 1960s. In August 1965, President Johnson issued Executive Order 11241, which formally eliminated deferments for childless men who got married after August 26, 1965, and in October 1965, the Selective Service declared that childless married men (irrespective of the date of marriage) were to be called up. Both announcements came as a surprise (New York Times 1965a). Since married men with children remained exempt, the declarations provided a strong incentive for young couples to conceive a (first-born) child. Before August 1965, marriage had been a sufficient condition for a deferment. Even just a few hours before the August 26 midnight deadline, desperate couples tried to make use of this provision by quickly scheduling their wedding. Between August and October, couples who had missed the deadline had to satisfy an additional condition--conceiving a child. Childless men who got married in this period were still subject to the draft and so had an incentive to conceive a child. In October 1965, the risk of induction was further extended to all couples who had remained childless. Finally, in April 1970, the family deferments were entirely eliminated by Executive Order 11527 (The Selective Service System, Office of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs 2004).
Past research has demonstrated that taxes and expenditure programs can affect fertility (e.g., Whittington, Alm, and Peters 1990; see also Milligan 2005, for an excellent review) as well as the timing of delivery (Dickert-Conlin and Chandra 1999). The goal of this article was to provide additional evidence on the responsiveness of childbearing to incentives embedded in public policy by studying a dramatic, yet unexamined government intervention--the effects of the Vietnam War paternity deferments on the decision to conceive a first-born child. As discussed in the popular press, Vice President Dick Cheney's first daughter, Elizabeth, was born 9 mo 2 d after the Selective Service System announced that childless married men were to be drafted (Boston Globe 2000; Slate Chatterbox 2004). Did draft-eligible men strategically react to the announcement? And, if so, how widespread and fast was the response?
To my knowledge, no one has investigated the impacts of the Vietnam draft on natality. Using the Vietnam draft rules to identify a causal effect, however, I build on several prior studies. Angrist, for example, uses the exogeneity of the Vietnam draft rules to identify the effects of military service on lifetime earnings (Angrist 1990; Angrist and Chen 2007) and to measure the racial differences in the value of military service (Angrist 1991). Gullason (1989) and Card and Lemieux (2001, 2002) estimate the effects of the Vietnam draft on schooling, explicitly recognizing that college attendance often served as a vehicle to avoid the draft. Both studies find a significant effect of the probability of being drafted on school enrollment.
The fact that the changes in the Selective Service rules were both unexpected and widely publicized makes this an ideal example to study the effects of policy on fertility decisions. Milligan (2005) argues that the assumptions made about the timing of the response to policy are arbitrary since a reaction will be delayed not only by a 9-mo gestational lag but also by the time necessary for the diffusion of information about the change in policy. In the case examined here, however, the criticism seems less relevant. Newspaper clippings from August 27, 1965, suggest that the issuance of the Executive Order 11241 did receive broad attention. For example, the story was listed on the front pages of New York Times (1965c) and Washington Post (1965b). The benefits of becoming a father were made explicit: "From now on, a draft-age man who gets married and becomes a father before being called into service will go into the same deferred class as other fathers" (Washington Post 1965b, A12). Similarly, on October 27, 1965, one day after the Selective Service declared that childless married men were to be called up, the top U.S. newspapers commented on the policy change (New York Times 1965a; Washington Post 1965a). (1) It is reasonable to assume that the general public was well aware of the news.
Also, given the urgency of the situation for the potential draftees, any behavioral response was likely to be fast. In the mid-1960s, the risk of induction facing young American men was increasing dramatically. In the year 1965, when the new policies were announced, the number of men inducted each month increased by more than sixfold from less than 6,000 to nearly 39,000 (Figure 1). And, as anecdotal evidence suggests, young couples were ready to react almost immediately. For example, after President Johnson's Executive Order was issued on August 26, 1965, limiting the eligibility for marital deferments to men married on or before that date, many couples quickly scheduled their wedding in order to beat the midnight deadline (New York Times 1965b).
Finally, information about the fecundity of the U.S. population in the early 1960s confirms that young women were, on average, able to conceive a child quickly. In the year 1960, 52% of Americans aged 20-24 yr were able to conceive within a month from trying, and 77% were successful within 2 mo (Crist 2004). Thus, a fast and relatively strong reaction to the Executive Order issuance and the Selective Service announcement is realistic.
II. DATA AND METHODS
To empirically investigate the effects of the Vietnam draft on natality, I focus on the impacts of President Johnson's Executive Order 11241 and the October 1965 Selective Service announcement and make use of the fact that these policies affected different groups of young men differently. In particular, I use a difference-in-differences type of approach and compare the effects of the policy changes on the behavior of treatment and control groups of young men.
Ideally, all American men in the draft-eligible age would constitute the treatment group. Unfortunately, however, the data set most suitable for the study--the Vital Statistics of the United States (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare 1963-1977)--does not provide detailed information on paternal characteristics. (2) Therefore, I use maternal age as a proxy for the father's age and adjust for the possibility of bias due to misclassification of some women into the treatment and/or the control group. A new adjustment method developed in Lewbel (2003) is ideal for the purpose at hand and is described in more detail in the Correction for Misclassification section and the Technical Appendix. It is worth foreshadowing here that the unadjusted results are conservative since any misclassification into the treatment and/ or the control group will bias the estimated treatment effect downward.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
The Vital Statistics report the number of births for the following age cohorts: younger than 15 yr, 15-19 yr, 20-24 yr, 25-29 yr, 30-34 yr, 35-39 yr, 40-44 yr, 4549 yr, and 50 yr and older. In my baseline model, I use women aged 20-24 yr as the treatment group since only men up to 25 yr of age were eligible for the draft and since women, on average, tend to be younger than their partners (Table 1). I exclude teenagers from the baseline analysis since women younger than 15 yr were unlikely to be affected by the government policy and since mothers aged 15-19 yr seem diverse with respect to their fertility responsiveness (the attitudes toward family planning will likely differ among women in this group). Also, my calculations suggest that between 17.3% (year 1963) and 26.7% (year 1968) of mothers aged 15-19 yr were single in the period under study. The corresponding estimates are 5.7% and 8.3% for mothers aged 20-24 yr. (3) In an alternative specification, I add teenagers (15-19 yr old) to the treatment group. Women aged 25-29 yr--with husbands likely to be 26 yr or older and thus ineligible for the Vietnam draft--comprise the control group.
To assess the validity of my treatment...
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