Hate Is Too Great a Burden to Bear: Hate Crimes and the Mental Health of Refugees

Daniel Graeber and Felicitas Schikora

No 1130, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract: Against a background of increasing violence against non-natives, we estimate the effect of hate crime on refugees’ mental health in Germany. For this purpose, we combine two datasets: administrative records on xenophobic crime against refugee shelters by the Federal Criminal Office and the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees. We apply a regression discontinuity design in time to estimate the effect of interest. Our results indicate that hate crime has a substantial negative effect on several mental health indicators, including the Mental Component Summary score and the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 score. The effects are stronger for refugees with closer geographic proximity to the focal hate crime and refugees with low country-specific human capital. While the estimated effect is only transitory, we argue that negative mental health shocks during the critical period after arrival have important long-term consequences.

Keywords: Mental health; hate crime; migration; refugees; human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 I10 J15 J24 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53 p.
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-ltv, nep-mig and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Hate is too great a burden to bear: Hate crimes and the mental health of refugees (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp1130

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