TY  - JOUR
AU  - Cesur,Resul
AU  - Sabia,Joseph J.
AU  - Tekin,Erdal
TI  - The Psychological Costs of War: Military Combat and Mental Health
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16927
PY  - 2011
Y2  - April 2011
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16927
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16927.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Resul Cesur
Finance Department
University of Connecticut
2100 Hillside Road Unit 1041
Storrs, CT 06269-1041
E-Mail: cesur@business.uconn.edu

Joseph J. Sabia
United States Military Academy
Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis
Department of Economics
West Point, N.Y. 10996
E-Mail: joe_sabia@yahoo.com

Erdal Tekin
Department of Economics
Andrew Young School of Policy Studies
Georgia State University
P.O. Box 3992
Atlanta, GA 30302-3992
Tel: 404/413-0163
Fax: 404/413-0145
E-Mail: tekin@gsu.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2011-08-01
AB  - While descriptive evidence suggests that deployment in the Global War on Terrorism is associated with adverse mental health, the causal effect of combat is not well established.  Using data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we exploit exogenous variation in deployment assignment and find that soldiers deployed to combat zones where they engage in frequent enemy firefight or witness allied or civilian deaths are at substantially increased risk for suicidal ideation, psychological counseling, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  Our estimates imply lower-bound health care costs of $1.5 to $2.7 billion for combat-induced PTSD.
ER  -