An Economic Interpretation of Hate Crime

This paper utilizes an established economic framework, grounded in Becker's (1981) path-breaking analysis of altruism and envy within the family, to explore hate crimes, also known as bias-motivated crimes. After developing a hate crime economic framework, we make use of a unique data set on hate crime data compiled by the FBI since 1992 to estimate the determinants of hate crimes across states using both a random effects and a fixed effects approach. While there are limitations in the use of bias-motivation crime data in empirical analysis, we are able to uncover interesting and thought-provoking insights into hate crimes which are empirically distinguishable from other crime.