Social Movement on Organization : How "Black Lives Matter" Movement Influences Airbnb Performance

“Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement is one of the largest social movements highlighting race-related issues. Although the movement's discourse emphasizes systematic racism and police brutality related to societal and policy aspects, the movement is equally about economic issues and prospects for minorities, which are insufficiently examined in the literature. We study how the BLM movement affects participants on sharing economy platforms on which racial bias has been extensively documented. Using a theoretical perspective from the social movement and organizations literature, we investigate the dynamic impact of the BLM movement on Airbnb listing performance in the United States between October 2014 and December 2019. We leverage a difference-in-differences design and find that BLM positively impacts Airbnb listing performance, with an average increase of 1.8% in occupancy rate and 5.52% in revenue in the six months afterward. Particularly germane to this study, we examine the moderation effects of neighborhood police brutality cases and Airbnb host race. We find that the occurrence of police brutality in a neighborhood negatively moderates the BLM effect while African American hosts, as detected by a deep learning algorithm on host profiles from Airbnb listing pages, benefit more from BLM events. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in light of the findings.