Abstract
This paper analyzes a hidden cost of war: the effect of the mass mobilization of reserve troops on the response times of domestic emergency services to accidents. We provide a statistical examination of this linkage following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and find that mobilization significantly increases response times to accidents in the United States. These mobilization-related costs are exacerbated by both legal restrictions and issues of replacing highly specialized human capital.
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Notes
The survey was sent to 8,500 member departments with 1,271 responding.
To provide some sense of magnitude, Steel (2004), p. 181 reports that between 2000 and 2003, nearly 3,800 complaints were filed by reservists against their employers. Approximately 90 % of these cases were related specifically to job benefit reinstatement. Between 2006 and 2011, more than 8,600 USERRA cases were filed (US Department of Labor 2012, p. 8).
To be counted as a fatal accident, the death has to be the result of the accident and it has to occur within 30 days of the incident.
Log-transforming the dependent variable leads to ease of interpretation, since coefficient estimates in a log-linear specification roughly correspond to elasticities, i.e., percent changes in the dependent variable from a one-unit change in the variable of interest.
We exclude 629 cases because the emergency call was canceled, but response times were reported as more than an hour. In some cases, response times were recorded as more than 24 h.
For robustness, we also ran a random effects model. However, a Hausman test rejected the random effects model as a consistent estimator.
At the suggestion of a referee, we have also run the regressions reported in Table 4 using the natural log of RESDENS rather than the levels. The results are identical in direction of effect and goodness of fit (R2), and similar in statistical significance.
For robustness, we also included monthly fixed effects in the regressions shown in Table 4 (not reported—available upon request). While this causes us to lose all observations wherein only one fatal accident occurred in a month in a given county, the coefficient estimates on RESDENS are remarkably similar in direction, magnitude, and statistical significance for all regressions except the city fixed effects regression. The city fixed effects regression no longer reveals a statistically significant result, although the sign remains positive.
We calculated the simple correlation between state-level reserve density and the percentage of the state population living in urban environments as reported in the 2000 Census. For the overall sample, the simple correlation is −0.44, and it is −0.36 in our first year of data (year 2001).
It is possible that larger budgets could lead to shortened response times by increasing response staffing and the capital (i.e., vehicles) available to responders. For the most part, we were able to include variables measuring seasonal factors that might be captured with time dummies, such as snow and wetness of the roads. For robustness, we have estimated the same regressions as reported in Table 4, except including monthly fixed effects. We also ran another set of regressions that included state-and-year fixed effects. The signs and magnitudes of the coefficient estimates on our variable of interest, RESDENS, remains nearly identical to the previous results in regressions in three of the four regressions confirming our previous findings. These results of these robustness checks are available upon request.
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Coyne, C.J., Hall, A.R., McLaughlin, P.A. et al. A hidden cost of war: the impact of mobilizing reserve troops on emergency response times. Public Choice 161, 289–303 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0200-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0200-4