TITLE:
Black Lives Matter and Granger Causal Testing: A Signal of Economic Deprivation
AUTHORS:
Jacob Gifford, Jeffrey Oliver
KEYWORDS:
BLM, Granger Causality, Social Movements
JOURNAL NAME:
Modern Economy,
Vol.12 No.11,
November
29,
2021
ABSTRACT: BlackLivesMatter (BLM) protests achieved
historically high rates of participation in 2020, resultant of social and
economic distress. This study observes the effect of strain through both a
collective action framework and statistical methodology. Withstanding the
departure of new social movement theories from the traditional paradigm, we
apply an economic lens to understand the underlying
strain on the BLM population. The Google Trends API and Granger Causal testing
demonstrate that the outlying 2020 increase in social movement participation is
predicated on the COVID-19 pandemic. There were significant short-run economic
effects, namely, the misallocation of resources and labor market disequilibrium on the Black community. Our analysis
additionally demonstrates the
discrepancies between variable search rate increases and changes in their real counterparts. With all
other contributing factors held constant, we find significant causal
relationships towards BLM search rates, implying a directional propagation of
pandemic-related socioeconomic forces and the resulting social movement
participation, signaling economic deprivation.