Neeraj Kaushal

Priming COVID-19 salience increases prejudice and discriminatory intent against Asians and Hispanics

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 132 citations

= 5,000). We find that priming COVID-19 salience has an immediate, statistically significant impact: compared to the control group, respondents in the treatment group exhibited increased prejudice and discriminatory intent against East Asian, South Asian, and Hispanic hypothetical room-seekers. The treatment effect is more pronounced in increasing extreme negative attitudes toward the three minority groups than decreasing extreme positive attitudes toward them. This is partly due to the treatmen…

Do refugees impact voting behavior in the host country? Evidence from Syrian refugee inflows to Turkey

Public Choice · 2020 · 77 citations

Timing of social distancing policies and COVID-19 mortality: county-level evidence from the U.S.

Journal of Population Economics · 2021 · 32 citations

Using county-level data on COVID-19 mortality and infections, along with county-level information on the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), we examine how the speed of NPI adoption affected COVID-19 mortality in the United States. Our estimates suggest that adopting safer-at-home orders or non-essential business closures 1 day before infections double can curtail the COVID-19 death rate by 1.9%. This finding proves robust to alternative measures of NPI adoption speed, model spe…

Effects of the Expanded Child Tax Credit on Household Spending: Estimates Based on U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey Data

National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-06-01 · 13 citations

The Child Tax Credit (CTC) was substantially expanded through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, making the benefit more generous, fully refundable, and more periodic. Early studies documented the positive impact of the expanded CTC on reducing poverty and food insufficiency, but there is little research on the impact it had on household spending and, specifically, its impact on child-related spending. We use data from the Consumer Expenditure Interview Survey (CE) and impute CTC payments for…

Pandemic and prejudice: Results from a national survey experiment

PLoS ONE · 2022-04-13 · 13 citations

Do health and economic shocks exacerbate prejudice towards racial/ethnic minority groups? We investigate this question in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic by collecting nationally representative survey data with an embedded experiment. Results show that priming COVID-19 salience has an immediate impact: compared to the control group, respondents in the treatment group reported increased prejudice towards East Asian and Hispanic colleagues. East Asians in the treatment group faced higher prejudi…