Understanding the Impact of Immigration on Crime

Almost three quarters of Americans believe that immigration increases crime. Yet, existing academic research has shown no such effect. Using panel data on US counties, Jörg L. Spenkuch has presented empirical evidence on a systematic but small impact of immigration on crime. Consistent with the economic model of crime this effect is stronger for crimes motivated by financial gain, such as motor vehicle theft and robbery. Moreover, the effect is only present for those immigrants most likely to have poor labour market outcomes.

Jörg Spenkuch's research interests are in political economy and labour economics. His most recent work examines the effect of political advertising on election outcomes. Other work tests game-theoretic theories of human behaviour. One paper, for instance, exploits quasi-random variation in the alphabetical composition of the US Senate, and, therefore, the order in which Senators get to cast their votes in order show that Senators rely on backward reasoning to strategically preempt each other. He is also currently working on issues related to strategic voting, learning in non-market environments and on the interaction between religion and political extremism.

While at CESifo, Mr Spenkuch will be pursuing a project that explores how relative rankings give rise to peer effects in schools. Preliminary results from a randomised controlled trial as well as several large observational data sets suggest that a student's achievement improves as ordinal rank among their peers increases, even conditional on measures of ability. At the same time, problem behaviours worsen as rank declines.

Jörg Spenkuch is Assistant Professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He joined the Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Department (MEDS) at Kellogg in 2013 after receiving his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago, where he studied under the tutelage of Steven Levitt and Gary Becker. He also hold an MA in Economics from the University of Chicago and BAs in both Economics and Business Administration from the University of St. Gallen.