Crime

In 2016 and 2017 I led a project at the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security on the arrival of asylum reception centers and whether this affected crime in Dutch neighborhoods drawing on state-of-the-art sociological theories and analytical tools (e.g., panel and spatial analysis). We employed register micro data from Statistics Netherlands and complemented this with data from other agencies, and Eurostat. The dataset comprised the entire Dutch population in 2005, and the period between 2010 and 2016. Our longitudinal approach not only required tackling unobserved heterogeneity, but also to compile several neighborhood characteristics such as the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index and Gini coefficient in each panel, as well as distance matrices for approximately 12,000 Dutch neighborhoods. The research report in Dutch can be downloaded here.

Papers based on this project are currently being prepared for submission to journals in collaboration with Prof. Wim Bernasco (Free University Amsterdam) and Prof. Arjen Leerkes (Maastricht University and Erasmus University Rotterdam). Earlier drafts have been presented at the European Survey Research Association in 2019, Metropolis International Conference in 2017, and at the Dutch Society for Criminology in 2016.