This paper develops a model of the war against illegal drugs in both producer and consumer countries. The paper studies the trade-off faced by the government of the drug consumer country between prevention policies (aimed at reducing the demand for drugs) and enforcement policies (aimed at...

We show that the recent rise in Afghan opium production is caused by violent conflicts. Violence destroys roads and irrigation, crucial to alternative crops, and weakens local incentives to rebuild infrastructure and enforce law and order. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western...

We show that the War on Drugs launched by the Mexican President Felipe Calderón in 2007 pushed drug cartels into large-scale oil thefts. Municipalities that the presidential candidate’s party barely won at the local elections in 2007-2009 exhibit a larger increase in illegal oil taps over the...

Violence in Mexico has reached unprecedented levels in recent times. After the government began a crackdown on drug cartels, nation-wide homicides almost tripled between 2006 and 2010. Using rich longitudinal plant-level data, this paper studies the impact of violent conflict on firms,...

We study how NAFTA changed the geography of violence in Mexico. We propose that this open border policy increased trafficking profits of Mexican cartels, resulting in violent competition among them. We test this hypothesis by comparing changes in drug-related homicides after NAFTA's introduction...