Joint Development and Microeconomics Seminar with Pauline Grosjean (UNSW)

Abstract: Did Trump rallies aggravate anti-Black racism? Using data from nearly 12 million traffic stops, we show that the probability that a police officer stops a Black driver increases by 5.1% after a Trump rally during his 2015-2016 campaign. The effect is immediate, specific to Black drivers, lasts for up to 50 days after the rally, and is not due to changes in drivers' behavior. The effects are significantly larger among officers who are more racially biased, and in areas with more racist attitudes today, that experienced more racial violence during the Jim Crow era, or that relied more heavily on slavery. Results from a 2016 online experiment show that Trump's campaign speech specifically aggravated respondents' prejudice that Blacks are violent. We take this as evidence that although not explicitly anti-Black, Trump's campaign radicalized racial prejudice against Black people -- through a phenomenon known as dog-whistling-- and the expression of such prejudice in a critical and potentially violent dimension: police behavior.

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