Research by Tim Johnson, the Grace and Elmer Goudy Associate Professor of Public Management & Policy Analysis at Willamette’s Atkinson Graduate School of Management, was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the world’s top scientific journals.
In the research, Johnson and co-author Dalton Conley of Princeton University report evidence from the Vietnam draft lotteries indicating that exposure to military induction an individual’s likelihood of working in the civilian U.S. federal government.
“We examined whether birthdates that were assigned lottery numbers called for induction in the Vietnam Draft appear more frequently in the federal personnel records of draft-eligible men,” Johnson explains. “Since lottery numbers were assigned randomly, this disproportionate frequency, which we find in the data, indicates that lottery-imposed military induction influenced entry into civilian government work later in life.”
These findings clarify why federal government employees identify as military veterans at several times the rate that individuals in the wider community do. The findings also offer insight into the labor market activities of veterans re-entering civilian life.