Geographical mobility among military personnel: A survey on willingness to pay for commuting and moving

The objectives of Norway’s security and defense policy are to enforce sovereignty, secure territorial integrity, and protect the government and society. Characterized by neighboring the great power Russia in the north, a long coastline, and vast marine areas, the security situation for Norway implies that the Armed Forces need significant operational presence in areas with slim population bases. A central quality of the production of defense capabilities is response time. In crisis, conflict, or war, it is key for the Armed Forces to respond swiftly. Response time is obviously influenced by the personnel’s residence. The Armed Forces’ dependence on the distance between its employees’ residence and their location of employment is unique. The Armed Forces are dependent on incentive systems that secure sufficient geographical mobility among the personnel. We have currently little knowledge of how well the incentives work towards inducing such mobility. Does geographical mobility vary between groups of personnel, and what is the share of personnel that change their mobility behavior in response to increased monetary incentives? In this report, we study military personnel’s preferences for geographical mobility in the Norwegian Armed Forces. More specifically, we study how military employees evaluate strains related to mobility and the willingness to pay for daily commuting, weekly commuting, and moving. We use a survey with 1310 respondents conducted in 2017. The survey was sent out to members of two labor unions. The respondents are thus not randomly assigned to the survey. Furthermore, the response rate is low among the assigned employees. The survey may therefore be weakened by selection and self-selection biases. Regardless of the potential selection biases, we find support for the claim that the geographical mobility can be increased by strengthening the monetary incentives for commuting and moving. The survey also shows, however, that there are substantial shares of the employees that will not let monetary incentives affect their mobility behavior. We exploit this survey to learn more about how to design future surveys within this area in the Armed Forces, including both how to construct queries and to generate hypotheses about the military personnel’s geographical mobility. Surveys provide an important method to uncover the effects of potential reforms of the incentive systems. We recommend such surveys to investigate further the Armed Forces’ need for geographical mobility and the personnel’s preferences for commuting and moving. Future surveys should expand the respondent base, preferably with a representative sample, improve the queries and include more background variables, such as gender and residence area.