This paper asks whether scarcity increases violence in markets that lack a centralized authority. We construct a model in which, by raising prices, scarcity fosters violence. Guided by our model, we examine this effect in the Mexican cocaine trade. At a monthly frequency, scarcity created by cocaine seizures in Colombia, Mexico's main cocaine supplier, increases violence in Mexico. The effects are larger in municipalities near the United States, with multiple cartels and with strong support for PAN (the incumbent party). Between 2006 and 2009 the decline in cocaine supply from Colombia could account for 10% to 14% of the increase in violence in Mexico.
This paper studies the effects of enforcement on illegal behavior in the context of a large aerial spraying program designed to curb coca cultivation in Colombia. In 2006, the Colombian government pledged not to spray a 10 km band around the frontier with Ecuador due to diplomatic frictions arising from the possibly negative collateral effects of this policy on the Ecuadorian side of the border. We exploit this variation to estimate the effect of spraying on coca cultivation by regression discontinuity around the 10 km threshold and by conditional differences in differences. Our results suggest that spraying one additional hectare reduces coca cultivation by 0.022 to 0.03 hectares; these effects are too small to make aerial spraying a cost-effective policy for reducing cocaine production in Colombia.
We model the war on drugs in source countries as a conflict over scarce inputs in successive levels of the production and trafficking chain, and study how policies aimed at different stages affect prices and quantities in upstream and downstream markets. We use the model to study Plan Colombia, a large intervention aimed at reducing the downstream supply of cocaine by targeting illicit crops and blocking the transport of cocaine outside this source country. The model fits the main patterns found in the data, including the displacement of the drug trade to other source countries, the increase in coca crops’ productivity as a response to eradication, and the lack of apparent effects in consumer markets. We use a reasonable parametrization of our model to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of different policies implemented under Plan Colombia. We find that the marginal cost to the U.S. of reducing cocaine transacted in retail markets by one kilogram is $940,000, if it subsidizes eradication efforts; and $175,000, if it subsidizes interdiction efforts in Colombia.
We study how property crime distorts consumption decisions. Using an incomplete information model, we argue that consuming conspicuous goods reveals information to criminals seeking bountiful victims and increases the likelihood of being victimized. Thus, property crime reduces the consumption of visible goods, even when these cannot be directly stolen but simply carry information about a potential victim's wealth. We exploit the large decline in property crime in the U.S. during the 90s to test this mechanism. Using data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey from 1986 to 2003, we find that households located in states experiencing sharper reductions in property crime increased significantly their consumption of visible goods, even when these goods are not generally stolen, both in absolute terms and relative to other consumption goods. Our findings hold when we instrument the decline in property crime during the 90s using a variety of strategies.
In this contribution we lay out a simple political economy theory that helps explain the current debate on prohibitionist drug policies in Latin America and their slow but sustained collapse as a strategy to confront illegal drug production and trafficking. Viewed from the perspective of producer and transit countries, prohibitionist drug policies are a transfer of the costs of the drug problem from consumer to producer and transit countries, where the latter are pushed to design and implement supply-reduction policies. The contribution shows how the low effectiveness and high costs of these policies have led the region to ask for an urgent and evidence-based debate about alternatives to strictly prohibitionist drug policies.