Trade Networks, Heroin Markets, and the Labor Market Outcomes of Vietnam Veterans
Jakub Lonsky,
Isabel Ruiz and
Carlos Vargas-Silva
No 974, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)
Abstract:
The role of ethnic immigrant networks in facilitating international trade is a well-established phenomenon in the literature. However, it is less clear whether this relationship extends to illegal trade and unauthorized immigrants. In this paper, we tackle this question by focusing on the case of the heroin trade and unauthorized Chinese immigrants in the early 1990s United States. Between mid-1980s and mid-1990s, Southeast Asia became the dominant source of heroin in the US. Heroin from this region was trafficked into the US by Chinese organized criminals, whose presence across the country can be approximated by the location of unauthorized Chinese immigrants. Instrumenting for the unauthorized Chinese immigrant enclaves in 1990 with their 1900 counterpart, we first show that Chinese presence in a community led to a sizeable increase in local opiates-related arrests, a proxy for local heroin markets. This effect is driven by arrests for sale/manufacturing of the drugs. Next, we examine the consequences of Chinese-trafficked heroin by looking at its impact on US Vietnam-era veterans - a group particularly vulnerable to heroin addiction in the early 1990s. Using a triple-difference estimation, we find mostly small but statistically significant detrimental effects on labor market outcomes of Vietnam veterans residing in unauthorized Chinese enclaves in 1990.
Keywords: Trade networks; heroin markets; Vietnam veterans; labor market outcomes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F16 F22 J15 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-his, nep-int, nep-lab, nep-law, nep-mig, nep-net, nep-sea and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/245915/1/GLO-DP-0974.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Trade networks, heroin markets, and the labor market outcomes of Vietnam veterans (2022) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:glodps:974
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().