Studies in the Estimation of Elasticities of U.S. Army Recruit Production Factors

Abstract

The United States military recruiting commands are tasked with providing new recruits in sufficient numbers, of the correct types, to maintain the national defense. To accomplish this they are authorized by Congress to advertise and to offer certain incentives to attract eligible persons into the required billets. These programs involve costs and, with increasingly severe budget restrictions, it is important that the dollars available be spent in the best possible manner. A number of fairly recent studies have attempted to estimate the relative effects of advertising and various other incentives on the production of enlisted contracts. This paper discusses some issues involved in such estimation, reviews the data used in one recent study, and employs this data to estimate several alternative models of contract production. Recommendations are made about collecting and maintaining accurate data for the investigation of tradeoffs of resource allocations