%0 Report
        %A Entorf, Horst
%A Lange, Martin
        %T Refugees Welcome? Understanding the Regional Heterogeneity of Anti-Foreigner Hate Crimes in Germany
        %D 2019
        %8 2019 Mar
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 12229
        %U https://www.iza.org/publications/dp12229
        %X In this article, we examine anti-foreigner hate crime in the wake of the large influx of asylum seekers to Germany in 2014 and 2015. By exploiting the quasi-experimental assignment of asylum seekers to German regions, we estimate the causal effect of an unexpected and sudden change in the share of the foreign-born population on anti-foreigner hate crime. Our county-level analysis shows that not simply the size of regional asylum seeker inflows drives the increase in hate crime, but the rapid compositional change of the residential population:
Areas with previously low shares of foreign-born inhabitants that face large-scale immigration of asylum seekers witness the strongest upsurge in hate crime. Economically deprived regions and regions with a legacy of anti-foreigner hate crimes are also found to be prone to hate crime against refugees. However, when we explicitly control for East-West German differences, the predominance of native-born residents at the local level stands out as the single most important factor explaining the sudden increase in hate crime. 
        %K natural experiment
%K immigration
%K hate crime
%K regional conditions