IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp9260.html

Reducing Risks in Wartime Through Capital-Labor Substitution: Evidence from World War II

Author

Listed:
  • Rohlfs, Chris

    (Morgan Stanley)

  • Sullivan, Ryan

    (Naval Postgraduate School)

  • Kniesner, Thomas J.

    (Claremont Graduate University)

Abstract

Our research uses data from multiple archival sources to examine substitution among armored (tank-intensive), infantry (troop-intensive), and airborne (also troop-intensive) military units, as well as mid-war reorganizations of each type, to estimate the marginal cost of reducing U.S. fatalities in World War II, holding constant mission effectiveness, usage intensity, and task difficulty. If the government acted as though it equated marginal benefits and costs, the marginal cost figure measures the implicit value placed on soldiers' lives. Our preferred estimates indicate that infantrymen's lives were valued in 2009 dollars between $0 and $0.5 million and armored troops' lives were valued between $2 million and $6 million, relative to the efficient $1 million to $2 million 1940s-era private value of life. We find that the reorganizations of the armored and airborne divisions both increased efficiency, one by reducing costs with little increase in fatalities and the other by reducing fatalities with little increase in costs.

Suggested Citation

  • Rohlfs, Chris & Sullivan, Ryan & Kniesner, Thomas J., 2015. "Reducing Risks in Wartime Through Capital-Labor Substitution: Evidence from World War II," IZA Discussion Papers 9260, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9260
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp9260.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lafond, François & Greenwald, Diana & Farmer, J. Doyne, 2022. "Can Stimulating Demand Drive Costs Down? World War II as a Natural Experiment," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 82(3), pages 727-764, September.
    2. Laura Armey & Thomas J. Kniesner & John D. Leeth & Ryan Sullivan, 2022. "Combat, casualties, and compensation: Evidence from Iraq and Afghanistan," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 40(1), pages 66-82, January.
    3. Viscusi W. Kip, 2019. "The Mortality Cost Metric for the Costs of War," Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 25(3), pages 1-10, September.
    4. Chris Rohlfs & Ryan Sullivan & Jeffrey Treistman & Ying Deng, 2015. "Using Combat Losses of Medical Personnel to Estimate the Impact of Trauma Care in Battle: Evidence from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan," Defence and Peace Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 26(5), pages 465-490, October.
    5. Kniesner, Thomas J. & Sullivan, Ryan & Viscusi, W. Kip, 2024. "The Military VSL," IZA Discussion Papers 17441, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    6. Castañeda Dower, Paul & Markevich, Andrei & Weber, Shlomo, 2021. "The value of a statistical life in a dictatorship: Evidence from Stalin," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 133(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • H56 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - National Security and War
    • J17 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Value of Life; Foregone Income
    • N42 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - U.S.; Canada: 1913-
    • D24 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Production; Cost; Capital; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity; Capacity
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9260. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Mark Fallak (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaalu.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.