Meet the: increased competition among criminal organisations and the explosion of violence in Mexico

Laura H. Atuesta and Aldo Ponce

Global Crime, 2017, vol. 18, issue 4, 375-402

Abstract: Several previous studies have found that interventions by security forces against criminal organisations result in increased violence related to organised crime. However, much less is known about how and why this effect occurs. Our study not only identifies the causal mechanisms that explain this outcome, but also evaluates the empirical validity of these mechanisms. Employing a novel data set, we find that following security-force intervention, the number of criminal organisations increases, and such greater fragmentation in turn raises the incidence of violence among criminal organisations as the relative power of the organisations changes. We employ a mediation model to verify the existence of these causal mechanisms. In addition, we find a decreasing rate of rise in levels of violence as the number of organisations increases.

Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17440572.2017.1354520 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:taf:fglcxx:v:18:y:2017:i:4:p:375-402

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FGLC20

DOI: 10.1080/17440572.2017.1354520

Access Statistics for this article

Global Crime is currently edited by Carlo Morselli

More articles in Global Crime from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().