Violence in Mexico has reached unprecedented levels in recent times. After the government began a crackdown on drug … studies the impact of violent conflict on firms, exploiting this period of heightened violence in Mexico commonly referred to … as the Mexican Drug War. The empirical strategy uses spatiotemporal variation in violence across Mexican cities and an …

Empirical evidence reveals that unemployment tends to increase property crime but that it has no effect on violent … crime. To explain these facts, we examine a model of criminal gangs and suggest that there is a substitution effect between … property crime and violent crime at work. In the model, non-monetary valuation of gang membership is private knowledge. Thus …

There is a vigorous debate on whether arrests for domestic violence (DV) will deter future abuse or create a …, arrest increases the probability an offender is charged with a crime. Our findings argue against recent calls for a … decriminalization of domestic violence and suggest the optimal police response is to lower the threshold for arrest …

We study how NAFTA changed the geography of violence in Mexico. We propose that this open border policy increased … 27% of the pre-NAFTA mean. These results cannot be explained by changes in worker’s opportunity costs of using violence …