We re-examine the view that wars make strong states, taking advantage of panel data to address two of the most obvious endogeneity concerns that arise in this context: initial conditions and persistence of state capacity. Our main message is that, in modern times, there is no evidence that wars...

Colombia is an interesting case study within emerging countries. Through 150 years of democratic tradition and seven decades of sound fiscal and monetary policies, the country has displayed institutional strength and economic growth, in spite of strong external shocks, rent- seeking by sectoral...

En el estudio se identificaron los principales problemas que Colombia afronta para lograr un desarrollo económico consolidado y se sugirieron recomendaciones de política pública de corto, mediano y largo plazo para superarlos. Los cinco elementos en los cuales se basó el análisis fueron:...

This paper develops an incomplete information model wherein individuals face a trade-off between status and security when deciding the optimal amount of conspicuous consumption. On the one hand, we assume that individuals derive utility from status,which is obtained by signaling wealth through...

We model the war on drugs in source countries as a conflict over scarce inputs of successive levels of the production and trafficking chain. We explicitly model the vertical structure of the drug trade as being composed of several stages, and study how different policies aimed at different...

Abstract We document the existence of a Crime Kuznets Curve in US states since the 1970s. As in come level shave risen, crime has followed an inverted U-shaped pattern, first increasing and then dropping. The Crime Kuznets Curve is not explained by income inequality. In fact, we show that during...

The Plan Nacional de Vigilancia Comunitaria por Cuadrantes (PNVCC) is a new police patrolling program introduced in the eight major cities of Colombia in 2010 by the National Police. The strategy divides the largest cities into small geographical areas (cuadrantes), assigns six policemen to...

Experience from the last decade in Colombia and Mexico suggests that violence increases when governments achieve their objective of beheading and fragmenting drug trafficking organizations (DTOs). In this paper I provide a theoretical framework to understand this behavior. Drawing elements from...

This paper develops a simple model of the war against illegal drugs in producer and consumer countries. Our analysis shows how the equilibrium quantity of illegal drugs, as well as their price, depends on key parameters of the model, among them the price elasticity of demand, and the...

This paper proposes a new identification strategy to estimate the causal impact of illicit drug markets on violence using a panel of Colombian municipalities covering the period 1994-2008. Using a UNODC survey of Colombian rural households involved in coca cultivation, we estimate the...