Economic Consequences of Protest Repression: Evidence from Political Consumerism

The study of protest repression has extensively examined the impacts of repression on protest per se. But the implications of repression on economic phenomena are much less considered. This study contributes to the literature by examining the economic consequences of protest repression with evidence of political consumerism in Hong Kong after the Anti-ELAB Movement in 2019. We utilized spatial regression and an instrumental variable design with a novel dataset on the geographical information of the pro-movement “yellow restaurants”. We find evidence that districts exposed to tear gas during the movement tend to have a higher ratio of yellow restaurants after the movement. We further examine the heterogeneous effects of protest repression and find that the effects are stronger in the districts with a higher pro-democracy voting share and the districts with severer housing unaffordability issues but are weaker in the districts with higher median income. This study hence sheds light on understanding the political consumerism that has become a crucial form of social and economic activism worldwide.

Our study also contributes to the literature through a novel dataset and measurement of political consumerism. The existing literature generally uses interviews and surveys to study citizens who participate in political consumerism, which involves the problems of sampling biases and artificiality in that respondents may not report their true feelings. Our study instead examines the geographical information of all yellow restaurants in Hong Kong, which cover the whole population and avoid sampling bias and artificiality.