Regional Science and Urban Economics

Does migration cause crime? Drawing on recent migratory flows to Germany, I address this question by distinguishing two types of migrants: asylum seekers and recognized refugees. Using German administrative panel data from 2010 to 2015, I add to the literature by disentangling the direct crime impact of both groups from indirect crime responses by other citizens. For asylum seekers, I exploit dispersal policies and locational restrictions and find no causal impact on crime except for migration-specific offenses. For recognized refugees, who may endogenously move, I apply a shift-share instrument and find a positive association between the share of recognized refugees and the overall crime rate, which is driven by non-violent property crimes and frauds. The empirical results are robust to several robustness checks and prove consistent with theoretical expectations.