Relatore: dott. Gianluca Bortoletto - Research Grant Holder for the PRIN project at the University of Padua, Committee member of PhDEVS, platform for virtual seminars in Economics, Doctoral Researcher in Economics, Dept. of Economics, University of Birmingham

Abstract: Immigration and its relationship with crime rates has been widely studied in the literature. Most of the previous studies focus on total immigration or use asylum seekers data. In this paper, I used data at province-level in Italy for the period 2010-2017 and I investigated the impact of a specific type of immigration that is immigration from fragile countries following the list provided by the World Bank. Initially, I explored the link through a baseline fixed-effects model taking into account both macro categories (e.g., homicides and slaughters for all reasons, violent crimes not leading to death, property crimes) and single types of crimes (e.g., blows, menaces, rapes, theft, kidnapping, mafia crimes). At a subsequent stage, I employed an instrumental variables estimation to correct for endogeneity issues. The results show that, when looking at macro categories of crimes FCS crimes was not significant in any of the categories when correcting for endogeneity. For single types of crimes, the results show a significant negative association with damage crimes and a positive association with mafia crimes. However, after some robustness checks the effect on damage crime disappeared while it remained the positive association with mafia-crime. Specifically, the results suggested that a 10 percent increase in immigration from fragile countries is associated with a 9 percent increase in mafia crimes.

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