Effects of Education and Military Service on Men's Marital Prospects and Long-Term Health

A substantial literature has documented that education and military service are correlated with many important outcomes, but in many cases it is not clear whether this indicates a causal relationship or simply an inability to eliminate omitted variables bias. I attempt to resolve this question for two sets of outcomes: marital prospects and long-term health.;In the first chapter, I estimate the effects of education and military service on men's marital prospects using an instrumental variables approach based on variation in educational incentives created by the Vietnam draft. I find that a one-year increase in a man's education leads to a one-year increase in his wife's education conditional on marriage, but does not impact his marital status. I find that Vietnam-era military service increases flows in and out of marriage and in some models has a negative effect on spousal education. I also show that mistakenly treating either education or military service as exogenous has a large impact on the estimated effect of the other variable.;The second chapter employs a similar approach to explore the effects of college education and Vietnam-era military service on long-term health. While I find that additional education positively impacts health, the results suggest that part of the observed positive correlation between education and health may be attributable to omitted variables. I also show that Vietnam-era military service led to declines in health, and that at least some of the negative health effects that may have been experienced by Vietnam veterans are persistent, as they can still be observed decades later.;The third chapter exploits between-cohort variation in the probability of military service to investigate how World War II and the G.I. Bill altered the structure of marriage, and finds that they had important spillover effects beyond their direct effects on men's educational attainment. We find that the additional education received by returning veterans allowed them to marry women with higher levels of education, indicating that the benefits of education extend beyond its effect on earnings and highlighting a mechanism through which socioeconomic status may be passed on to the next generation.