Pains, Guns and Moves: The Effect of the US Opioid Epidemic on Mexican Migration

Neutralizing the Tentacles of Organized Crime. Assessment of the Impact of an Anti-Crime Measure on Mafia Violence in Italy

“…Organised crime influences politics by bribery and threats to "induce a given policy maker to change his action from that preferred by society to that preferred by the group" Di Tella, 2003, p. 1128). For instance, in El Salvador, Mexico and Colombia politicians are often physically attacked by criminal gangs (see for instance Melnikov et al, 2020;Sviatschi, 2019;Blattman et al, 2020;Daniele et al, 2020). Studies on developed countries have shown that criminal organizations use violence strategically in the post-electoral period, in view of the potential "moral hazard" inherent in politicians' bargaining with clans (Daniele and Dipoppa, 2017;Dell, 2015); also, organised crime can attack politicians before elections, in order to redirect votes to the candidate they back (Olivieri and Sberna, 2014;Alesina et al, 2019;Acemoglu et al, 2020).…”

Neutralizing the Tentacles of Organized Crime. Assessment of an Anti-Crime Measure in Fighting Mafia Violence

“…Organized crime influences politics by bribery and threats to "induce a given policy maker to change his action from that preferred by society to that preferred by the group" Di Tella, 2003, p. 1128). For instance, in El Salvador, Mexico and Colombia politicians are often physically attacked by criminal gangs (see for instance Melnikov et al, 2020;Sviatschi, 2019;Blattman et al, 2020;Daniele et al, 2020). Studies on developed countries have shown that criminal organizations use violence in the post-electoral period, in view of the potential "moral hazard" inherent in politicians' bargaining with clans (Daniele and Dipoppa, 2017;Daniele, 2019;Dell, 2015), and also before elections, in order to redirect votes to the candidate they back or discourage qualified adversary candidates from running Olivieri and Sberna, 2014 ;Alesina et al, 2019;Acemoglu et al, 2020. This pervasive phenomenon shows the need for empirical assessment of the e cacy of government policies in safeguarding public security.…”

Fueling Organized Crime: The Mexican War on Drugs and Oil Thefts

“…We add to a burgeoning literature on the impact of the Mexican War on Drugs and other government crackdowns against criminal organizations in Latin America (see Lessing, 2017, for a survey). Much of this literature emphasizes the unintended consequences of crackdowns such as violence (Ríos, 2013;Dube and Naidu, 2015;Calderón et al, 2015;Lindo and Padilla-Romo, 2018;Daniele et al, 2020), refugee out-migration (Rios, 2014;Orozco-Aleman and Gonzalez-Lozano, 2017), and even increases in drug production (Prem, Vargas, and Mejía, Prem et al). Importantly, the adverse effects of targeted enforcement policies may spill over to other regions within the same country, as they did in Mexico (Dell, 2015), and even to other countries, as occurred when cocaine seizures in Colombia increased conflict among Mexican drug cartels (Mejia and Restrepo, 2016;.…”