This article contributes to the literature on the impact of transitional justice measures using microfoundational evidence from experiments. We argue that there is a distributional dilemma at the heart of transitional justice programs, given that the State must allocate goods and services both...

La relación entre la percepción de seguridad y el crimen no siempre está atada a la victimización ni al el riesgo real de ser objeto de un acto delictivo, sino también al miedo de ser víctima de un delito. A partir de una encuesta orientada a la población de la Universidad de los Andes se...

En el presente documento se analizan y evalúan, desde una perspectiva jurídica, el desarrollo y eficiencia del proceso penal en los delitos de secuestro extorsivo y extorsión en Bogotá y Cundinamarca para el período 1998-2004. A partir de un estudio multivariado, en el que se controla por...

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...

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...

This paper measures the impact of crime on firm investment by exploiting variation in kidnappings in Colombia from 1996 to 2002. Our central result is that firms invest less when kidnappings target firms. We also find that aggregate crime rates-homicides, guerrilla attacks, and general...

This paper provides a thorough economic evaluation of the anti-drug policies implemented in Colombia between 2000 and 2006 under the so-called Plan Colombia. The paper develops a game theory model of the war against illegal drugs in producer countries. We explicitly model illegal drug markets,...

This paper estimates the impact of random terrorist attacks (landmines) in Colombia onthe health of babies born between 1998 and 2003. The results suggest that these types of terrorist activities that occur during a woman´s first trimester of pregnancy have a negative and significant impact on...