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While racial assortative mating and interracial unions have been a central interest in the study of race relations and family demography since the early twentieth century, there have been marked changes in the social contexts in which these processes have taken place in recent decades. This review article examines three important shifts: (a) the rise of population diversity and its impact on traditional views of racial integration, (b) the changing institution of marriage in American life, and (c) the increasing centrality of technology. We discuss how these societal shifts have challenged traditional understandings of preferences, opportunities, and intermediaries in the mate selection process, as well as new opportunities for interracial intimacy that these changes have introduced. We conclude with a discussion on conceptual issues and promising future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. is now a financialized economy, where the financial sector and its priorities have become increasingly dominant in all aspects of the economy. We ,focus on financialization as a [...]

Existing scholarship usually presents people's attitudes about guns as fixed and fully formed. Rarely are such attitudes examined as the outcome of social processes. As a result, while we know a great deal about what people think about guns, we know very little about the development of these beliefs. In this paper, we use a combination of surveys and life history interviews with a national sample of college students between the ages of 18 and 24 to examine how attitudes about guns develop in childhood and young adulthood. We find that while family gun ownership matters, positive attitudes about guns develop through active socialization that continues beyond childhood and is not reducible to family background. Relationships play a key role in this process, with changes in relationships often driving changes in attitudes about guns. Changes in attitudes about guns can take place in terms of both the content (what young adults think about guns) and the form (how young adults think about guns). In the transition to young adulthood, attitudes about guns develop from being articulated primarily as personal experiences connected to the activity of shooting guns or experiencing gun violence, to being articulated as political beliefs, connected to issues of regulation. These findings contribute to our understanding of gun attitudes by offering insights on not only what people think about guns but also how people come to think about guns in the ways that they do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have established that firm size is associated with a wage premium, but the wage premium has declined in recent decades. The authors examine the risk for unemployment by firm size during the initial outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 in the United States. Using both yearly and state-month variation, the authors find greater excess unemployment among workers in small enterprises than among those in larger firms. The gaps cannot be entirely attributed to the sorting of workers or to industrial context. The firm size advantage is most pronounced in sectors with high remotability but reverses in the sectors most affected by the pandemic. Overall, these findings suggest that firm size is linked to greater job security and that the pandemic may have accelerated prior trends regarding product and labor market concentration. They also point out that the initial policy responses did not provide sufficient protection for workers in small and medium-sized businesses., (© The Author(s) 2021.)

Recent waves of legislation have made it much easier for gun owners to obtain a Concealed Handgun License (CHL) and thereby carry their guns in public except when explicitly prohibited. Because data are difficult to access, our understanding of who seeks and obtains such licenses remains limited. Using data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, this article fills this empirical gap by describing demographic trends and characteristics of applicants for CHLs in five states: Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, Texas, and Utah. The results establish that (1) applications for CHLs are growing at fast rates; (2) there are significant gender and racial disparities in terms of who applies for CHLs, with men 2.9 to 5.5 times more likely to apply than women, and whites 1.3 to 2.0 times more likely to apply than blacks; (3) in Florida and Utah, these demographic gaps have widened over time; and (4) there are significant racial disparities in terms of application outcomes, with black applicants being 3.3 to 5.5 times more likely to be denied a license than white applicants. Moreover, we do not find the patterns in Massachusetts, a may-issue state, to be significantly different from the shall-issue states in our sample., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

The decline of employment-based health plans is commonly attributed to rising premium costs. Using restricted data and a matched sample from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey-Insurance Component, the authors extend previous studies by testing the relationships among premium costs, employment relationships, and the provision of health benefits between 1999 and 2012. The authors report that both establishment- and state-level union densities are associated with a higher likelihood of employers' providing health plans, whereas right-to-work legislation is associated with lower provision. These factors combined rival rising premium cost in predicting offering. This finding indicates that the declining provision of health benefits could be in part driven by the transformation of the employment relationship in the United States and that labor unions may remain a critical force in sustaining employment-based coverage in the twenty-first century.

Previous research documents a growing wage premium for elite financial workers since the 1980s. A second line of research finds substantial gender disparities in earnings and career mobility among elite financial workers. Yet little is known about whether women in finance still receive a wage premium compared with their nonfinance counterparts. In addition, few studies examine whether similar gender disparities exist among nonelite financial workers. This article examines how the wage premium for working in the financial sector varies by gender and parental status across the wage distribution. We report that women earn a greater wage premium than men in low-wage financial jobs, while almost all of the increase in wages in high finance is captured by elite men, particularly fathers. Consequently, the financial sector simultaneously exacerbates and mitigates gender inequalities at different locations of the labor market. Our findings highlight the significance of institutional context in amplifying and attenuating the reward and penalty associated with gender and parental status., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.