Consumer Sentiment Towards Asians in the Early Days of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Kerwin Kofi Charles, Jonathan Guryan and Kyung H. Park

No 33831, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We revisit the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic to examine whether restaurant foot traffic reveals changes in sentiment towards ethnic groups. Our findings show reduced demand for dining at Asian restaurants located inside Asian enclaves, while outside enclaves, the decline in visits to Asian restaurants was comparable to non-Asian restaurants. In contrast, Italian restaurant enclaves did not experience similar declines in foot traffic after news of the outbreak in Italy and the first U.S. case linked to travel to Italy. We also find suggestive evidence that the shift in consumption was associated with elevated negative sentiment towards Asians rather than efforts to avoid exposure to international travelers.

JEL-codes: I12 I18 J14 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-sea
Note: EH LS PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published as Kerwin Kofi Charles & Jonathan Guryan & Kyung H. Park, 2025. "Consumer sentiment towards Asians in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic," Journal of Public Economics, vol 247.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33831.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33831

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33831
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().