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Despite being one of the most prolific spenders on active labour market policies, and investing heavily in civic integration programmes, family policies and career and diversity plans, the native-migrant employment gap in Belgium is still one of the largest among EU and OECD countries. Past research has shown that even after controlling for human capital and other socio-demographic factors a large unexplained gap (often called ethnic gap or penalty) remains. This paper investigates how the motive for migrating to Belgium contributes to the native-migrant employment gap. Based on data from the 2014 Belgian LFS Ad Hoc Module on the labour market situation of migrants and their immediate descendants, we compare the employment outcomes of labour migrants (with and without a job prior to migration), family reunion migrants, student migrants and refugees with those of the native-born. In line with previous studies, we establish that refugees and family reunion migrants' employment likelihood is lower when compared to labour migrants and natives. Refugees who do work tend to do so in temporary jobs and in jobs that are below their skill levels. However, temporary employment is also prevalent among labour migrants without a job prior to migration and over qualification is a specific challenge for male student migrants.

We adopt a structural time series analysis to investigate the impact of parole abolition and sentence reform in Virginia on reported crime rates. The Commonwealth of Virginia abolished parole and reformed sentencing for all felony offences committed on or after January 1, 1995. To examine the impact of Virginia's change in legislation on reported crime rates from 1995 onwards, we perform an intervention time series analysis based on structural time series models. We empirically find that the change in legislation has significantly reduced the burglary rates and to a lesser extent the murder rates in Virginia. For other violent crimes such as rape and aggravated assault the evidence of a significant reduction in crime rates is less evident or is not found. This empirical study for Virginia also provides an illustration of how an effective intervention time series analysis can be carried out in crime studies.

The Commonwealth of Virginia abolished parole and reformed sentencing for all felony of-fenders committed on or after January 1, 1995. We examine the impact of this legislationon reported crime rates using different time series approaches. In particular, structuraltime series models are considered as an alternative to the Box-Jenkins ARIMA modelsthat form the standard time series approach to intervention analysis. Limited supportfor the deterrent impact of parole abolition and sentence reform is obtained using uni-variate modelling devices, even after including unemployment as an explanatory variabIe.Finally, the flexibility of structural time series models is illustrated by presenting a mul-tivariate analysis that provides some additional evidence of the deterrent impact of thenew legislation.

We provide causal evidence of the impact of the Brexit referendum vote on hate crime in the United Kingdom (UK). Using various data sources, including unique data collected from the UK Police Forces by Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, and various estimation methods (difference-in-differences, event-study analysis and synthetic control methods), we find that the Brexit referendum led to an increase in hate crime by around 15-25%. This effect was concentrated in the first quarter after the referendum and was larger in areas that voted to leave the European Union (EU). We also provide evidence against the hypotheses that this was due to victims' greater willingness to report crimes or due to changes in police behaviour and perceptions of the victims. We also present suggestive evidence that the media and social media played a small but significant role in the increase in hate crime.