Maurin, Eric, and Theodora Xenogiani. 2007. “Demand for Education and Labor Market Outcomes: Lessons from the Abolition of Compulsory Conscription in France.” Journal of Human Resources 42(4): 795–819.
Before 1997, education was a way for young French men to avoid military service in the army. After the abolition of compulsory conscription in 1997, this incentive to stay on in education disappeared. We show that the decrease in the benefit of pursuing education for men was followed by a fall in their educational achievement relative to women and by a decrease in their relative entry wages. These results suggest that high school dropout rates could be reduced by policies increasing the immediate benefits of pursuing education and that it would yield a substantial improvement in early labor market outcomes.
Eric Maurin at Paris School of Economics (PSE) and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris) and Theodora Xenogiani at the OECD Development Centre. The authors would like to thank Thomas Piketty, Fabien Postel-Vinay, Costas Meghir, Sandra McNally, Jean-Marc Robin, Rajeev Dehejia, Regina Riphahn, Christina Gathmann, and three anonymous referees for helpful comments. They also thank participants at the IZA/SOLE Transatlantic meeting (Amersee, 2004), the EALE/SOLE conference (San Francisco, 2005), research seminars at the CEE (LSE 2004), CREST (Paris, 2004), Jourdan (Paris 2004), and the Athens University of Economics and Business (2004) for their comments and suggestions. The authors are responsible for all remaining errors. The data used in this article are publicly available from the French National Statistical Office (INSEE).