Social Protests in Times of Social Distancing: Black Lives Matter and Covid-19

Abstract : Why did the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement gain unprecedented momentum in the midst of a pandemic? In this paper, we use county level variation in the timing and magnitude of exposure to COVID-19 to causally identify its effect on protests. Using super spreader events as a source of plausible exogenous variation, we find that counties that are more affected by the pandemic also experience a higher level of protest following the murder of George Floyd. We present several alternative identification strategies and a battery of robustness checks to confirm the validity of our results. We find that the effect is mainly driven by the mobilization of new allies that join the movement for the first time during the pandemic. Around half of the counties that protested never had any BLM protest before. Our evidence suggests that this change can be attributed to a rise in the salience of racial inequalities in the United States. At the same time, counties that traditionally engaged in protest (urban counties with large Black population shares) respond less to an increase in COVID-19 exposure as they are also the ones most severely affected by the pandemic and caught in what we call the "protest poverty trap".

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Religion and Persecution

Abstract : This paper investigates the relationship between local religiosity and episodes of persecutions in a sample of over 2,100 European cities during 1100-1850. We measure the hold of local religion by employing a novel proxy: the existence of the cults of saints in early Western Christianity (pre-1100). Our findings show that cities with an established cult of a saint are associated with a 16 and 10 percentage points (pp) increase in the likelihood of witch trials and killings and were 11 pp more likely to engage in Jewish persecutions. However, cities with more progressive gender norms, measured by the presence of a female saint cult, are less likely to persecute witches compared to male-only saint cities. Our baseline relationship persists after controlling for a range of city-level economic, geographic and institutional characteristics and after accounting for other major confounders. We find two plausible mechanisms behind the saints-persecution relationship: (i) changes in norms induced by longer exposure to Christianity; and (ii) proximity of religious groups due to congruence of religious festivities.

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Frontier Planters, Immigrants, and the Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

Abstract : A protracted legislative battle culminated in the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. We build a new data set of roll-call votes on 1884-1888 emancipation bills in the legislature, and connect it to local features of the districts. This allows us to unpack how the material interests of each of the 122 electoral districts coalesced into an abolitionist coalition. Our results help reconcile previous theories of labor coercion. We find slavery-intensive districts opposed emancipation. In line with a labor demand effect, we also find more support for emancipation where immigrants provided an alternative source of labor, and in line with an outside option effect, where slaves could more easily escape. A two-pronged instrumental variables strategy that uses variation in (a) history and geography and (b) heteroskedasticity with respect to the regressors supports a causal interpretation of our main results.

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