Do immigrants increase crime? Spatial analysis in a middle-income country

Mauricio Leiva, Felipe Vasquez-Lavín and Roberto D. Ponce Oliva
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Felipe Antonio Vásquez Lavín

World Development, 2020, vol. 126, issue C

Abstract: The last decade has seen a significant global increase in immigration. This large growth has caused an increasing opposition to immigration in local populations in many parts of the world, partly because of a commonly held belief that immigration increases crime. Using data from Chile, spanning 10 years, from 2005 to 2015, we analyze the relationship between immigration and crime through a dynamic Spatial Durbin Model (SDM), which accounts for the possible bias for omitted variables. As the spatial model is dynamic and based on panel data, it is possible to identify direct and indirect effects on both the short- (the same period) and long-term (next period) bases. Our results show that there is no statistical evidence to link an increase in the number of immigrants to a rise in the rate of any type of crime. If any, we found a negative relationship between the number of immigrants and crime for only one out of the eight crime types analyzed.

Keywords: Crime; Immigration; Spatial econometrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 J15 K49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X19303778
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:126:y:2020:i:c:s0305750x19303778

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104728

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().