Pains, Guns and Moves: The Effect of the US Opioid Epidemic on Mexican Migration

Happy to announce that the paper "Pains, Guns and Moves: The Effect of the US Opioid Epidemic on Mexican Migration", written by Gianmarco Daniele,  Marco Le Moglie and Federico Masera  has been accepted in the Journal of Development Economics (forthcoming). 

They exploit the fact that in 2010 a series of reforms to the US health care system resulted in a shift in demand from legal opiates to heroin. This demand shock had considerable effects on Mexico, the main supplier of heroin consumed in the US: violence and conflicts increased in Mexican municipalities suitable for opium production, as they became highly valuable to drug cartels. People migrated out of these municipalities to escape this violence, mostly to areas close to the US border and into the US. This paper clearly shows that the US opioid epidemic generated large Mexican migration flows: the rise in US demand for heroin increased internal migration by an estimated 90,000 individuals and migration across the border at least by 12,000.