As part of the Brown Bag Lunch series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Kritika Saxena, PhD student in Development Economics.

Social protests in times of social distancing: Black Lives Matter and COVID-19

Abstract: The effect of pandemics on protests is theoretically ambiguous. One the one hand, activists may be deterred from protesting to protect their own (private good) or others’ health (public good). On the other hand, reduced economic activity implies a lower opportunity cost of protesting, the increased private cost may enhance the informative value of protests (signaling) and the salience of racial inequality may be higher in areas most affected by the pandemic. In this paper, we leverage the COVID-19 pandemic as a shock to the incentives of protesting for an a priori unrelated cause: putting an end to police violence against African Americans in the USA. We use an instrumental variable approach to estimate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. We find that counties most affected by the pandemic experienced an increase in BLM events at both the extensive and the intensive margin.