parent's Army personnel data, we evaluate the effect of a soldier's deployment on the academic achievement of his or her children. We find that deployments have modest adverse effects across most academic subjects, with lengthy deployments and deployments during the month of testing leading to the largest detrimental effects. Further evidence suggests that the adverse effects in academic achievement may persist for several years.

This paper aims to improve our understanding of how transnational terrorist organizations emerge, survive, thrive, and eventually die. We use a data set that catalogues terrorist organizations and their attacks over time (the ITERATE data base of thousands of terrorist events from 1968 through 2007) and merge those data with socio-economic information about the environment in which each attack occurs. We use these data to trace the life-cycle pattern of terrorist activity and the organizations that perpetrate them. We identify at least two types of terrorist organizations -recidivists and one-hit wonders. We find that recidivist organizations, those that have repeatedly attacked, are less likely to survive once political and socio-economic factors have been included. However, we find that sporadic or one-hit wonders are not easily deterred by socio-economic factors, leaving open a role for counter-insurgency tactics.JEL Codes: E6, H1, H5, D74, O11

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Although hundreds of studies have demonstrated that risk preferences shape people's choices under uncertainty, the complexity of how attitudes toward risk play out across various pivotal settings and key populations leaves considerable gaps in knowledge. We study a unique sample of a cohort of future military leaders at the United States Military Academy (West Point), nearly all of whom now hold commissions in the US Army officer corps. Using a hypothetical instrument to elicit preferences across a variety of domains, we find that cadets are risk averse, on average, which has potentially important implications for future management of military conflicts and programs. Our results also show that diversity programs aimed at increasing the number of women and minorities at West Point are likely to increase the average level of risk aversion within the officer corps. This finding suggests that working with officers to strengthen cognitive flexibility and to be attuned to a possible wedge between their innate preferences and the needs of the situation may be important, particularly for those who wish to enter occupational fields where the willingness to take risks is critical.