The Rise and Persistence of Illegal Crops: Evidence from a Naive Policy Announcement

Mounu Prem, Juan Vargas and Daniel Mejía
Additional contact information
Daniel Mejía: Department of Economics, Universidad de los Andes

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2023, vol. 105, issue 2, 344-358

Abstract: Policies based on prohibition and repression to fight the war on drugs have largely failed in a variety of contexts. However, incentive-based policies may also fail and have unintended negative consequences if policymakers do not properly anticipate behavioral reactions. This is an particularly important concern in the case of policies announced prior to their implementation. In this paper, we show that a naive and untimely policy announcement generated an unprecedented escalation in cocaine production in Colombia, offsetting almost 20 years and billions of dollars of U.S.-backed efforts to stop drug production and cartel action.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01059
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Rise and Persistence of Illegal Crops: Evidence from a Naive Policy Announcement (2020)
Working Paper: The Rise and Persistence of Illegal Crops: Evidence from a Naive Policy Announcement (2020)
Working Paper: The Rise and Persistence of Illegal Crops: Evidence from a Naive Policy Announcement (2019)
Working Paper: The Rise and Persistence of Illegal Crops: Evidence from a Naive Policy Announcement (2019)
Working Paper: The rise and persistence of illegal crops: Evidence from a naive policy announcement (2019)
Working Paper: The Rise and Persistence of Illegal Crops: Evidence from a Naive Policy Announcement (2019)
Working Paper: The rise and persistence of illegal crops: evidence from a naive policy announcement (2019)
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:tpr:restat:v:105:y:2023:i:2:p:344-358

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().