Immigration and Crime in Italy: Updating the Evidence from Bianchi, Buonanno, and Pinotti (2012)

This thesis updates and extends the empirical analysis of Bianchi, Buonanno, and Pinotti (2012), who examined the causal relationship between immigration and crime across Italian provinces during the period 1990–2003. Their study found no significant causal effect of immigration on overall crime rates once the endogeneity of immigrant location choices was addressed through an instrumental variable strategy based on supply-push migration factors in origin countries. The original analysis was constrained to end in 2003 due to a change in Italy's national crime recording standard introduced by ISTAT in 2004. This thesis constructs a new province-level panel dataset for the period 2004–2025, replicating the original empirical design using updated crime and immigration data. The analysis employs a two-way fixed-effects panel regression alongside the instrumental variable approach of the original paper, using bilateral migration flows toward other European countries as an instrument for immigrant inflows across Italian provinces. The updated period covers a substantially different immigration landscape, including a doubling of the foreign resident population, a shift in origin countries toward Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, the 2015 Mediterranean migration crisis, and several major policy changes. The thesis examines whether the null result of the original study holds under these new conditions, contributing updated empirical evidence to an ongoing and policy-relevant debate.