The author uses cohabitation data from the 2010 Chinese Family Panel Studies to analyze the association of premarital cohabitation with subsequent divorce of first marriage. After balancing selection factors that influence premarital cohabitation through propensity score matching, the author uses Cox proportional hazards models to examine the selection, causation, and diffusion perspectives on the relationship between premarital cohabitation and marital dissolution. The results show that premarital cohabitation is positively associated with divorce for those married in the early‐reform period (1980–1994) when cohabitation was uncommon. However, this relationship disappears for those married in the late‐reform period (1995–2010) when cohabitation became more prevalent. The findings suggest variation in the link between premarital cohabitation and divorce across different marriage cohorts and provide strong evidence for the diffusion perspective in postreform China. Supplemental sensitivity analyses support the robustness of the conclusion.

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The retrenchment of court-ordered school desegregation has been more variable and incomplete than often acknowledged, challenging common accounts that blame changes in federal policy and legal precedent. This study supplements these accounts by examining local factors that influenced whether and when desegregation orders were dismissed between 1970 and 2013. After accounting for federal policy changes and districts' variable success in desegregating schools, several ostensibly race-neutral organizational, financial, and political incentives appear to influence the survival of desegregation orders. Racial competition dynamics related to local racial composition also seem to play a role, as desegregation orders have been most vulnerable when and where black population shares surpass a tipping point of about 40%. Court-ordered school desegregation was one of the civil rights movement's prime achievements, it was the U.S. government's largest intrusion into a school system built on local control, and it was often very effective. But like other civil rights policies, it was rife with ambiguous goals and methods that permitted a range of outcomes and made it vulnerable to political attack (Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey 2012; Pedriana and Stryker 2017). We

This study uses the first age-period-cohort (APC) analysis of segregation to examine changes in U.S. public school segregation from 1999-2000 to 2013-2014. APC analyses disentangle distinct sources of change in segregation, and they account for grade effects that could distort temporal trends if grade distributions change over time. Findings indicate that grade effects are substantial, drastically reducing segregation at the transition to middle school and further at the transition to high school. These grade effects do not substantially distort the analysis of recent trends, however, because grade distributions were sufficiently stable. Black-white segregation was stagnant overall, while Hispanic-white segregation declined modestly. In both cases, declines across periods were offset by increases across cohorts. Further analyses reveal variation in these trends across metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas, regions, and areas with different histories of desegregation policy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been an unprecedented threat to the survival of U.S. firms. Prior studies show that firms use market strategies such as layoffs and pay cuts to cope with organizational crises. Little is known about how firms engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate political activities (CPA) during crises. This study focuses on how America’s largest publicly traded firms use these two nonmarket strategies to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Results suggest that public firms actively engaged in both CSR and CPA after the outbreak. The preliminary estimation shows that firms listed in Russell 1000 have donated or pledged over $3.9 billion to corporate philanthropy and invested over 2.1 billion in observed political donations and lobbying in Congress in the early pandemic. The marked variation in corporate nonmarket strategies could be partially attributed to corporate elites’ political ideology, political accountability, and perceived COVID-19 risk.