Does Military Service Make You a More Violent Person?: Evidence from the Vietnam Draft Lottery

In this paper, I use the Vietnam draft lottery as a natural experiment to measure the effects of military service on crime. First, I present time-series evidence on self-reported sexual assault, domestic abuse, and incarcerations. I find that men from Vietnam-era cohorts are nearly twice as likely as those from surrounding cohorts to report having committed sexual assault. No such effects appear in the time-series for domestic abuse or incarcerations. Adjusting for the draft’s effects on education does not change this result. Next, I use the Vietnam draft lottery to measure military service’s effects on incarcerations. I find that the incarceration rate is slightly higher than average among men whose lottery numbers were called during Vietnam. However, this difference is small and insignificant, even after adjusting for the lottery’s positive effects on education. I propose a handful of explanations to reconcile these findings