Did Violence Against Asian-Americans Rise in 2020? Evidence from a Novel Approach to Measuring Potentially Racially-Motivated Attacks

Aleksei Knorre, Britte Van Tiem and Aaron Chalfin

No 32121, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Did anti-Asian violence rise after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic? Efforts to answer this question are compromised by the inherent difficulty of measuring racially-motivated crimes as well as concerns that reporting of racially-motivated hate crimes may have changed due to their increased salience during the pandemic. We pursue an alternative approach to studying whether anti-Asian violence rose after March 2020 that addresses each of these concerns. Using data from the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System, we study inter-race violence occurring in public spaces. While public violence declined among all Americans after March 2020, the share of public violence directed at Asian-Americans by people who were previously unknown to them – or were acquaintances – rose more than it did for other Americans. While this relationship did not hold among an auxiliary sample of large US cities, the national evidence is consistent with a modest increase in racially- motivated violence directed towards Asian-Americans.

JEL-codes: K4 K40 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-law and nep-sea
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