The abolishment of passport and any other type of border controls at the German-Polish and German-Czech border in December 2007 provoked public concerns that open border would increase cross-border crime. Despite these widespread concerns, there is still little research on whether the public...

Zwischen 2010 und 2015 hat sich die Anzahl der Asylanträge in Deutschland fast verzehnfacht. Ob dieser Anstieg der Flüchtlingsmigration zu mehr Kriminalität im Land führt, wird heftig debattiert. Eine neue RWI-Studie untersucht erstmals für diesen Zeitraum den ursächlichen Einfluss von...

In 2011, German police accidentally stumbled upon a previously unknown right-wing extremist group called the National Socialist Underground (NSU). Further investigations implicated the group in previously unexplained murders of mostly ethnically Turkish individuals and in other crimes targeting...

Using the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) data, this paper offers the first evidence that the 2011 news revelations about crimes committed by National Socialist Underground (NSU) network in early the 2000s resulted in an increase in worries about xenophobic hostility among NSU’s targeted...

Die mediale Berichterstattung zur Polizeilichen Kriminalstatistik (PKS) kulminiert nach der Veröffentlichung der kommunalen und Landesstatistiken im Frühjahr jeden Jahres mit der Veröffentlichung der bundesweiten Kriminalstatistik. Die Versuche der Sicherheitsbehörden (konkret des...

The rising trends both in drug addiction and crime rates are of major public concern in Germany. Surprisingly, the economic theory of crime seems to ignore the drugs-crime nexus, whereas the criminological literature considers illicit drug use a main reason of criminal activities. This paper...

This paper investigates the effect of local crime on well-being in Germany, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and a novel data set constructed from official police crime statistics, covering both counties and urban districts for the time period between 1994 and 2012. We find...