Essays on the economic geography of oppressive violent deviant behaviours

This dissertation consists of four self-contained essays on the economic geography of oppressive violent deviant behaviours, a definition identifying violent violations of social norms driven by oppressive urges against minorities. The common thread running through the essays is the quantitative exploration of how the local socioeconomic characteristics influence the occurrence and the scale of violence directed towards disempowered groups. The first chapter investigates the relationship between hate events and the socioeconomic/cultural characteristics of Italian Local Labour Market Areas, through a unique database with georeferenced hate manifestations. The estimation of a hurdle model identifies the local conditions acting as risk factors for hate occurrence and for hate frequency. The geography of refugees’ hosting structures appears as a predictor of both the occurrence and the frequency of hate, whereas foreign resident population does not display any significant influence. At the same time, trust works as a protective factor reducing the occurrence of hatred at the local level. Moreover, once the hurdle of experiencing at least one hate manifestation is crossed, fewer conditions are needed to fuel further hate in the same place. The second chapter analyses the influence of real-world socioeconomic features on online hate in Italy, exploiting a novel dataset on geotagged hate tweets. Results show a strong empirical association between the local economic dimension and cyberhate. Economic insecurity is robust risk factors for online hate, as well as economic inequality. The latter influences online hate along two channels: the local outlook of income inequality and the relative importance assigned to individualistic values by the established family type in the area. In the third chapter I investigate whether school bullying is affected by a cultural shock from migration. The analysis exploits the natural shock from migration which occurred in the UK after the 2004 European Union enlargement to empirically estimate how a sudden and sizeable migration inflow influences school bullying. The findings -robust to endogeneity of immigrants’ location choice- highlight that the cultural shock from migration determines an increase in school violence. The paper also suggests that existing language barriers act as a moderator for the migration shock by increasing its effect. The final chapter explores whether women’ propensity to report sexual crimes to the police is influenced by the local availability of specialized services for victims of sexual offences. Applying the synthetic control method to the UK, the empirical investigation shows that the local availability of dedicated services, as refuges and professional help, increases women’s willingness to seek justice. The positive effect of the local provision of specialized services holds even after the occurrence a of countrywide and prominent media campaign about sexual offences. This last finding further supports the importance of the availability of nearby services, since it suggests that nation-scale initiatives do not work as substitutes.