Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/106577 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 8632
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We exploit the increase in immigration flows into western European countries that took place in the 2000s to assess whether immigration affects crime victimization and the perception of criminality among European natives. Using data from the European Social Survey, the Labour Force Survey and other sources, we provide a set of fixed effects and instrumental variable estimations that deal with the endogenous sorting of immigration by region and with the sampling error in survey based measures of regional immigration shares, whose implications in terms of attenuation bias are investigated by means of Monte Carlo simulations. Our empirical findings show that an increase in immigration does not affect crime victimization, but it is associated with an increase in the fear of crime, the latter being consistently and positively correlated with the natives' unfavourable attitude toward immigrants. Our results reveal a misconception of the link between immigration and crime among European natives.
Subjects: 
crime
migration
victimization
perception
fear
JEL: 
J15
J61
K42
F22
R23
O15
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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