Essays in economics of discrimination and diversity[Essais sur l’économie de la discrimination et de la diversité]

This thesis consists of three chapters that examine from three different perspectives how diversity affects the economy. The first chapter focuses on racial discrimination in rental housing. I concentrate on Moscow's rental housing market, where landlords practice overt discrimination. Using a model with building-level fixed effects, I show that discrimination generates a racial differential in rents: non-discriminatory apartments are 4% more expensive. The second chapter focuses on competition between residents and tourists for urban amenities. Using TripAdvisor reviews, we construct panel data on tourism and consumption in Paris. We show that during the pandemic, a decline in tourism led to an increase in Parisians' satisfaction with restaurants and other amenities. The third chapter explores how contemporary social movements can broaden their base. Using super spread events as a source of plausible exogenous variation at the county level, we find that exposure to the pandemic led to an increase in the likelihood of observing BLM events online and offline. This effect is more pronounced in whiter, more affluent and suburban counties. We show that this effect is driven by higher social media take-up among non-traditional users.