Determining the effects of military service on those who volunteer is of vital importance in an age when service may lead to the loss of bodily function or life. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of military service with consideration for the demographic statuses of race, gender, and educational attainment on economic outcomes. Data for this study came from the Current Population Survey July 2010 with Veterans Supplement (N=83,000). Results from this study suggest that some veterans, namely those of minority racial status and lower educational attainment benefit from their military serve by achieving increased levels of household income as compared to similar non-veterans. Conversely, non-Hispanic White veterans and those with higher levels of educational attainment suffer negative consequences to levels of household income. Furthermore, differences among veterans were assessed. These results provide further insight into the experiences of veterans in the United States.

I use variation in childhood exposure to the Dust Bowl, an environmental shock to health and income, as a natural experiment to explain variation in adult human capital. I also examine a variety of mechanisms by which the Dust Bowl influenced later-life wellbeing, and investigate the scope for recovery from this early-life shock. I find that exposure to the Dust Bowl in childhood has statistically significant and economically meaningful adverse impacts on later-life outcomes, for instance, increasing disability and reducing fertility and college completion. These results hold even after accounting for the possibly confounding effects of the Great Depression, migration, and selective fertility or mortality. The effects I find are more severe for those born in agricultural states, suggesting that the Dust Bowl was most damaging via the destruction of agricultural livelihoods. This collapse of farm incomes, however, had the positive effect of increasing high school completion amongst the exposed, likely by reducing the demand for child farm labor where such labor was not essential to production, and thus decreasing the opportunity costs of secondary schooling; in this outcome, unlike in college completion, family income and student ability were irrelevant. Many of the worst adverse effects are found amongst those exposed prenatally and in early childhood, suggesting that congenital complications in capability development, together with low parental incomes in utero and thereafter, may be to blame for such later-life disadvantage. Together, these findings imply that the Dust Bowl acted largely "indirectly," as an economic shock that in turn affected in utero and early-life conditions, rather than "directly," through personal exposure (e.g. dust inhalation) in childhood. Lastly, results - particularly those on New Deal expenditure - imply both that remediation from early-life disaster is possible under the right circumstances, and that post-shock investment may have compensated for rather than reinforced damage to child endowments. The findings in this study are consistent with a multi-stage model of human capability formation, in which investments in one period respond to endowments in a previous one, and may either reinforce or compensate for these endowments.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This study explored the lived experiences of family case managers who routinely work with families who are culturally different from themselves. The purpose was to understand and interpret the meaning of culture and cultural difference as it relates to the engagement process with families. The research also sought to understand whether cultural insensitivity or bias may contribute to the overrepresentation of children of color in the child welfare system. The author conducted 10 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with graduates of a large, research-intensive Midwestern university’s Title-IV-E Social Work Program, who also were employed as family case managers in public child welfare. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and the analytic process of the hermeneutic circle. Results suggest the concept of culture is a complex term that encompasses many characteristics and a number of dimensions. In addition, four themes were identified as underlying the engagement process with culturally different families. These themes routinely overlapped, and family case managers often had to attend to each of the thematic areas simultaneously. At nearly every step in the engagement process, family case managers modulated their interactions in order to find balance and stability in their relationship with the family. Finally, poverty was revealed to be the most salient cultural difference in working with families involved in the child welfare system. These results have important implications for social work education, child welfare practice, and research on the overrepresentation of children of color in the child welfare system.