Kingpin Approaches to Fighting Crime and Community Violence: Evidence from Mexico's Drug War / Jason M. Lindo, María Padilla-Romo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lindo, Jason M.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Padilla-Romo, María.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21171.

NBER working paper series no. w21171

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Kingpin Approaches to Fighting Crime and Community Violence

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2015.

Summary:

This study considers the effects of the kingpin strategy, an approach to fighting organized crime in which law-enforcement efforts focus on capturing the leaders of criminal organizations, on community violence in the context of Mexico's drug war. Newly constructed historical data on drug-trafficking organizations' areas of operation at the municipality level and monthly homicide data allow us to control for a rich set of fixed effects and to leverage variation in the timing of kingpin captures to estimate their effects. This analysis indicates that kingpin captures have large and sustained effects on the homicide rate in the municipality of capture and smaller but significant effects on other municipalities where the kingpin's organization has a presence, supporting the notion that removing kingpins can have destabilizing effects throughout an organization that are accompanied by escalations in violence.

Notes:

Print version record

May 2015.