The DOI matches its Crossref record; 40 of the 40 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Income inequality and violent crime: Evidence from Mexico's drug war
Abstract
The relationship between income inequality and crime has attracted the interest of many researchers, but little convincing evidence exists on the causal effect of inequality on crime in developing countries. This paper estimates this effect in a unique context: Mexico's Drug War. The analysis takes advantage of a unique data set containing inequality and crime statistics for more than 2,000 Mexican municipalities covering a period of 20 years. Using an instrumental variable for inequality that tackles problems of reverse causality and omitted variable bias, this paper finds that an increment of one point in the Gini coefficient translates into an increase of more than 10 drug-related homicides per 100,000 inhabitants between 2006 and 2010. There are no significant effects before 2005. The fact that the effect was found during Mexico's Drug War and not before is likely because the cost of crime decreased with the proliferation of gangs (facilitating access to knowledge and logistics, lowering the marginal cost of criminal behavior), which, combined with rising inequality, increased the expected net benefit from criminal acts after 2005.
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Cites
Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach
Becker, G. S. (1968) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/259394 · Cited by 13,999
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Merton, R. K. (1938) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.2307/2084686 · Cited by 3,540
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Kawachi, I., Kennedy, B. P., Lochner, K., & Prothrow-Stith, D. (1997) · American Journal of Public Health · doi:10.2105/ajph.87.9.1491 · Cited by 3,212
Who Benefits from State and Local Economic Development Policies?
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The Cost of Inequality: Metropolitan Structure and Violent Crime
Blau, J. R., & Blau, P. M. (1982) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.2307/2095046 · Cited by 1,500 · cited 2×
“Blau and Blau (1982) argue that economic inequality is at the root of violent crime in the United States. In their findings, the role of variables such as poverty in explaining crime is outweighed by the predictive power of inequality. In this same line of work, Kelly (2000) finds that, in urban areas in the United St…”
Fajnzylber, P., Lederman, D., & Loayza, N. (2002) · The Journal of Law and Economics · doi:10.1086/338347 · Cited by 1,152
Micro-Level Estimation of Poverty and Inequality
Elbers, C., Lanjouw, J. O., & Lanjouw, P. (2003) · Econometrica · doi:10.1111/1468-0262.00399 · Cited by 930
Cited by
(2016) · doi:10.1596/25062 · Cited by 14
Metadata
- Authors
- Enamorado, T., López-Calva, L. F., Rodríguez-Castelán, C., & Winkler, H.
- Venue
- Journal of Development Economics
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2016-05
- Volume
- 120
- Pages
- 128-143
- ISSN
- 0304-3878 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1529686467
- Cited by
- 266
- References
- 40
- FWCI
- 71.46
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Enamorado, T., López-Calva, L. F., Rodríguez-Castelán, C., & Winkler, H. (2016). Income inequality and violent crime: Evidence from Mexico's drug war. Journal of Development Economics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2015.12.004
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