Unemployment and Right-wing Extremist Crime

Armin Falk, Andreas Kuhn () and Josef Zweimüller
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Andreas Kuhn: Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich, Switzerland, http://www.iew.uzh.ch/institute/people/kuhn.html

No 2009-16, NRN working papers from The Austrian Center for Labor Economics and the Analysis of the Welfare State, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Abstract: It is frequently argued that unemployment plays a crucial role for the occurrence of right- wing extremist crimes. We empirically test this hypothesis using data from Germany. We find that right-wing criminal activities occur more frequently when unemployment is high. The big difference in right-wing crime between East and West German states can mostly be attributed to differences in unemployment. This finding reinforces the importance of unemployment as an explanatory factor for right-wing crime and questions explanations based solely on the different socialization in former communist East Germany and the liberal West German states.

Keywords: Hate crime; right-wing extremism; unemployment; cost of unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J69 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2009-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
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http://www.labornrn.at/wp/wp0916.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Unemployment and Right‐wing Extremist Crime (2011)
Working Paper: Unemployment and Right-wing Extremist Crime (2009)
Working Paper: Unemployment and Right-Wing Extremist Crime (2005)
Working Paper: Unemployment and Right-Wing Extremist Crime (2005)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jku:nrnwps:2009_16

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