Germany has experienced a high and rising rate of anti-foreigner violence during the early 1990s. To analyze the determinants of crime against foreigners we assembled a new data set on the number and nature of such crimes at the county level based on newspaper reports. We find significant differences in the patterns of violence in the eastern and western parts of the country. The incidence of anti-foreigner crime is higher in the east and rises with distance from the former West German border. Economic variables tike unemployment and wages matter little for the level of crime once location in the east is taken into account. The relative number of foreigners in a county has no relationship with the incidence of ethnic crimes in the west, whereas in the east it has a positive association with the number of crimes per resident and a negative association with the number of crimes per foreign resident.

Alan B. Krueger is Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Princeton University. Jörn-Steffen Pischke is assistant professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The authors thank Dietmar Harhoff, Helmut Seitz, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. They are grateful to Henning Colsman-Freyberger for able research assistance and to Lisa Krueger for preparing the maps. They thank Dietmar Harhoff, Manfred Kuechler, and Martin Wort-mannfor data and the Institute for Policy Reform and the Sloan Foundation for financial support. The data and computer programs used lo generate the main results of the paper are available via anonymous FTP in the GERMANY subdirectory of IRS.PRINCETON.EDU until the end of the year 2000.