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...

Este capítulo presenta una radiografía detallada de la microeconomía de la producción y tráfico de cocaína en Colombia. El capítulo presenta una breve descripción de la evolución en el tiempo de las cifras agregadas sobre producción de cocaína y luego seconcentra en describir en...

Violence against union members in Colombia has been at the center of a debate for several years now. Union leaders and NGOs in Colombia and abroad continuously argue that free trade agreements with Colombia should be blocked based on the failure of the current Colombian government to protect...

En este estudio se toma la puesta en marcha del sistema de transporte masivo Transmilenio en la Avenida Caracas, una vía con altos índices de criminalidad en la ciudad de Bogotá, como un experimento natural para romper la simultaneidad entre crimen y políticas para combatirlo y para medir el...