[BostonCard]

Here’s the NBER paper.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w27408

The authors measured a net increase in hours at home after the onset of the protests, and the effect was larger in areas where the protests turned violent.

Event-study analyses provide strong evidence that net stay-at-home behavior increased following protest onset, consistent with the hypothesis that non-protesters’ behavior was substantially affected by urban protests. This effect was not fully explained by the imposition of city curfews. Estimated effects were generally larger for persistent protests and those accompanied by media reports of violence.

Note, as a public health intervention, I would think violent protests would not be my preferred policy tool. I mean, a posse of social distancing vigilantes might also work in much the same way (it did in China), but I wouldn’t support that. And of course, this analysis doesn’t rule out transmission among protesters. But that effect appears to be small to the extent that it reduced the amount of time that the rest of the population spent outside of their house (0.2 hrs, on average) and the effect of that on transmission. Since only about 1% of the population participated in a protest, the finding seems at least plausible to me.

BC

[BostonCard]

Here’s the NBER paper.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w27408

The authors measured a net increase in hours at home after the onset of the protests, and the effect was larger in areas where the protests turned violent.

Event-study analyses provide strong evidence that net stay-at-home behavior increased following protest onset, consistent with the hypothesis that non-protesters’ behavior was substantially affected by urban protests. This effect was not fully explained by the imposition of city curfews. Estimated effects were generally larger for persistent protests and those accompanied by media reports of violence.

Note, as a public health intervention, I would think violent protests would not be my preferred policy tool. I mean, a posse of social distancing vigilantes might also work in much the same way (it did in China), but I wouldn’t support that. And of course, this analysis doesn’t rule out transmission among protesters. But that effect appears to be small to the extent that it reduced the amount of time that the rest of the population spent outside of their house (0.2 hrs, on average) and the effect of that on transmission. Since only about 1% of the population participated in a protest, the finding seems at least plausible to me.

BC