We have the pleasure to announce  Michelangelo Rossi (Telecom Paris) as the next speaker in our CERNA Research Seminar series. The seminar will take place on Wednesday 21/9/2022 at 16:00 in Salle Chevalier. The log-in information for the live stream on Zoom will also be provided in due course.

Michelangelo will talk about:

Scapegoating and Discrimination in Times of Crisis: Evidence from Airbnb

(joint with M. Luca and E. Pronkina)

We present evidence that discrimination against Asian-American Airbnb users sharply increased at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a DiD approach, we find that hosts with distinctively Asian names experienced a 12 percent decline in guests relative to hosts with distinctively White names. In contrast, we do not see spikes in discrimination against Black or Hispanic hosts. Our results suggest that the rise in anti-Asian sentiment in 2020 translated to discrimination in economic activity, highlighting the ways in which scapegoating minority groups can shape markets. Our results also point to the role of platform design choices in enabling discrimination. 

The paper is available here: https://www.nber.org/papers/w30344

Michelangelo will be available for meetings so let me know if you want to have a slot.