Who fought the War on Terror? We find that as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan progressed, there was an increase in the fraction of active-duty Army enlistees who were white or from high-income neighborhoods and that these two groups selected combat occupations more often. Among men, we find an increase in deployment and combat injuries for white and Hispanic soldiers relative to black soldiers and for soldiers from high-income neighborhoods relative to those from low-income neighborhoods. This finding suggests that an all-volunteer force does not compel a disproportionate number of non-white and low socio-economic men to fight America's wars.

We evaluate the effect that payday loan access has on credit and labor market outcomes of individuals in the U.S. Army. Using the conditional random assignment of service members to different locations, we employ three identification strategies: cross-sectional variation in state policies, within-term variation in payday lending access, and a difference-in-difference analysis using the national Military Lending Act. We find few adverse effects of payday loan access on service members when using any of these methods, even when we examine dozens of subsamples that explore potential differential treatment effects.