The Dynamics of Discrimination and Assimilation : Theory and Evidence

This paper provides a unified framework to study the interactions between a minority group, a majority group, and political leaders. Theoretically, we set up a dynamic model of discrimination and assimilation choices and characterize the effect of a shock to the return to discriminatory actions. Empirically, we use text-analysis techniques on a novel dataset of tweets of “White American” and Chinese users from January to August 2020. We show that anti-Chinese discrimination increased following the COVID-19 outbreak and Trump’s tweet referring to COVID-19 as “Chinese virus.” In response, Chinese users tweeted assimilation-related content and criticism against the Chinese Communist Party