The impact of police violence: evidence from student protests*

We study the protest behavior of teenagers linked to a student killed by a stray bullet coming from a policeman in Chile. We use administrative data to follow the schoolmates of the victim and those living nearby the shooting in hundreds of protest and non-protest days. We find that police violence causes lower protest participation in street rallies but more adherence to test boycotts. These effects appear among schoolmates of the victim and not among students living nearby the killing. Negative educational consequences suffered by the schoolmates combined with previous results suggest that psychological mechanisms are a plausible explanation. *January 2022. We would like to thank Josefa Aguirre, José Ignacio Cuesta, Bruno Ferman, Marc Rockmore, Nicolás Rojas, Ignacio Silva, Danae Valenzuela, Noam Yuchtman and seminar participants at the LACEA Meeting, NEUDC, PUC-Chile, and Universidad del Rosario for comments and suggestions. We also thank Carolina Bernal, Katia Everke, Anita Zaldivar, and Catalina Zambrano for outstanding research assistance. Corresponding author email: fagonza4@uc.cl. González thanks Fondecyt (project 1210239) for financial support. Prem acknowledges IAST funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR) under grant ANR-17-EURE-0010 (Investissements d’Avenir program).