Military deployments and job assignments provide an opportunity to estimate the impact of parental absences and household relocations on children’s academic achievement. Combining U.S. Army personnel data with children’s standardized test scores from Texas, I find that parental absences adversely affect children’s test scores by a tenth of a standard deviation. Likewise, household relocations have modest negative effects on children’s test scores. Both parental absences and household relocations have the greatest detrimental effect on test scores of children with single parents, children with mothers in the army, children with lower‐ability parents, and younger children.

Military assignment mechanisms provide a unique opportunity to estimate the impact of high-performing mentors on job advancement of their subordinates. Combining US Army administrative data with officer evaluation reports, we find that high-performing mentors positively affect early junior officer promotion and that early promotion probabilities rise as the duration of the high-quality mentorship increases. These effects are largest for high-ability protégés. Junior officers who were exposed to multiple high-performing mentors did not experience an additional increase in promotion rates.