Kingpin Approaches to Fighting Crime and Community Violence: Evidence from Mexico's Drug War

Jason Lindo and María Padilla-Romo ()
Additional contact information
María Padilla-Romo: University of Tennessee

No 9067, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: 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 the criminal organization, on community violence in the context of Mexico's drug war. Newly available 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.

Keywords: drugs; Mexico; kingpin; crime; violence; cartels (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I18 K42 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Journal of Health Economics, 2018, 58, 253-268

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Related works:
Journal Article: Kingpin approaches to fighting crime and community violence: Evidence from Mexico's drug war (2018)
Working Paper: Kingpin Approaches to Fighting Crime and Community Violence: Evidence from Mexico's Drug War (2015)
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