This paper examines the impact of urban violence on the standardized test scores of public school students in Medellin. I use the school-level variation in exposure to local homicides for years 2004-2013 in a model that includes school and year fixed effects, allowing me to control for the...

Traditional theories of democracy suggest that political representation of excluded groups can reduce their incentives to engage in conflict. We consider the response of elites whose power is threatened by new political actors and study the consequences of political inclusion in a context of...

I study the causal effect of the foreign aid for development assistance —implemented by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)— on the intensity of municipality-level armed conflict in Colombia, for the period 2009-2013. To address potential endogeneity biases, I use a...

This paper theoretically assesses the role that uncertainty plays in the intensity of conflicts. The standard two-player rent-seeking contest model (Tullock, 1980) is extended to allow for privately known subjective values of the prize. The conflict is modeled as a Bayesian game on which each...

In this paper, we study how between-group wealth and size heterogeneity affect success probabilities as well as aggregate rent-seeking efforts when two groups compete for the allocation of a pure public good. Unlike with previous models, we measure the utility cost of rent-seeking in terms of...

This paper studies the effect of strengthening democracy, as captured by an increase in voting rights, on the incidence of violent civil conflict in nineteenth-century Colombia. Empirically studying the relationship between democracy and conflict is challenging, not only because of conceptual...

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...

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...

This paper explores the importance of the risk of violence on the decision making of rural households, using a unique panel data set for Colombian coffee-growers. We identify two channels. First, we examine the direct impact of conflict on agricultural production through the change in the...

Spanish Abstract: Este documento recopila y analiza la evidencia disponible sobre los vínculos entre oportunidades económicas, empleo y violencia asociada a jóvenes en América Latina y el Caribe. Como parte de una iniciativa liderada por El Centro Internacional de Investigaciones para el...