“Police-involved killings and economic sentiment of black households,” by Ann Owen, the Henry Platt Bristol Chair of Public Policy and Professor of Economics, and Assistant Professor of Economics Cody Couture, was recently published in Applied Economics Letters.
The paper presents the authors’ research findings showing that Black people become more pessimistic about their current household financial condition in response to highly-publicized incidents associated with police-involved killings of unarmed Black people.
Owen and Couture argue that racial differences in the assessment of economic circumstances can be a mechanism through which differences in economic outcomes can persist. They say this is because individuals with different beliefs about their financial condition may make different choices about risk-taking, spending, investing, and other long-term planning decisions.
“Our results show another way in which the effects of these tragic events reverberate through the Black community,” they said.
