Beliefs about Racial Discrimination and Support for Pro-Black Policies

23 January 2023 14:41

Beliefs about Racial Discrimination and Support for Pro-Black Policies

The paper titled "Beliefs about Racial Discrimination and Support for Pro-Black Policies" by Ingar Haaland and Christopher Rot has been published in The Review of Economics and Statistics.

ABSTRACT

This paper provides representative evidence on beliefs about racial discrimination and examines whether information causally affects support for pro-black policies. Eliciting quantitative beliefs about the extent of hiring discrimination against blacks, we uncover large disagreement about the extent of racial discrimination with particularly pronounced partisan differences. An information treatment leads to a convergence in beliefs about racial discrimination but does not lead to a similar convergence in support of pro-black policies. The results demonstrate that while providing information can substantially reduce disagreement about the extent of racial discrimination, it is not sufficient to reduce disagreement about pro-black policies.

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