According to official data from the Mortality Information System (SIM) of the Ministry of Health, the number of deaths caused by homicides in the State of Rio de Janeiro has declined between 2006 and 2009, from 7,099 to 5,064, which implies a decrease of 28.7% in the period. However, as we argue...

The prohibition of certain psychoactive drugs and the consequent police repression result in thousands of deaths from violent actions in Brazil each year. In this work, we quantify the magnitude of this problem based on some economic and public health indicators. Taking 2017 as a reference, we...

We report two results. First, we evaluate the impact of a nationwide anti-firearm legislation passed by the Brazilian Congress in December 2003 (Estatuto do Desarmamento, henceforth ED). Our identification strategy hinges on the hypothesis that the law had stronger impact in places where gun...

There is virtually a consensus that the ratio of suicides committed with guns to total suicides is the best way to indirectly measure gun ownership across different locations. However, such a proxy is not accurate for any locality with low population density in view that suicides are rare...