Two Awarded Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Grants

At the beginning of 2020, the CLEAN group has been awarded two Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Grants. The first project is titled “Economic Shocks, Social Insurance and Violent Crimes: Evidence from Brazil”, and will be conducted by Diogo Britto, Paolo Pinotti, and Breno Sampaio. In this project, we will estimate the impact of workers’ (mass) layoffs on homicides and other violent crimes – including domestic violence – in Brazil, one of the most violent countries in the World. The empirical analysis will exploit registry data on the universe of workers and criminal cases in Brazil over the period 2009-2017. From a policy perspective, we will examine whether unemployment benefits and conditional cash transfers play any role in attenuating the effect of labor market shocks.

A second grant has been awarded for the project “Drug cartels’ violence in new and traditional illegal markets", co-authored by Gianmarco Daniele, Marco Le Moglie and Paolo Pinotti. In this project, they explore an unintended consequence of the Mexican war on drugs, namely the entry of many drug cartels into a new criminal business: oil thefts. According to Pemex, the state-owned company that acted as a monopolist until 2013, the number of illegal taps increased from 213 in 2006 to 1,419 in 2011, and then further to 6,873 in 2016. They investigate which criminal groups first entered this new illegal business, depending on their market power in drug-trafficking. They will then examine the implications of tapping, as an alternative to drug-trafficking, on the extent of violence among cartels.