This paper continues my research program on violence and terrorism started 15 years ago. It presents in the first part through empirical exercises, the suitability of The Beveridge and Nelson decomposition of economic time series for pointing out the occurrence of terrorist attacks. It presents...

Abstract: I apply the Beveridge-Nelson business cycle decomposition method to the time series of murder in the United States (1900-2004). Separating out “permanent” from “cyclical” murder, I hypothesize that the cyclical part coincides with documented waves of organized crime, internal...

The urgent need for higher levels of productivity and competitiveness to meet the demands of the domestic and international market, poses serious challenges to productive and educational systems of the department of Santander, Colombia. It follows from the results obtained in the two sectors;...

Coca eradication has been aggressively pursued by the Colombian government to reduce the amount of land that agricultural households in the Andean country devote to this illegal crop. However, little work has been done to assess the causal effect of the policy on land allocation decisions. I use...

We present a case study of the market of drug dealing in the context of a drug producing country. A main characteristic of a drug producing country is that illegal drugs are more accessible and have dramatically lower prices in the street market compared to countries that do not produce drugs....

The main purpose of this note is to model an imperfect competitive and vertically integrated market structure of production and trafficking of cocaine. We consider the particular case of colombian cocaine market, but the results could be generalized to different scenarios. We model three main...

We present results of a qualitative study based on interviews with informal vendors and experts on informality carried out in Barranquilla, Colombia, in order to investigate whether corruption and informality are complements or substitutes. It was found that it is necessary to distinguish...