Green Gold: Avocado price shocks and violence in Mexico

The role of economic incentives in political armed conflict is well documented, but there is very little evidence on a growing and increasingly globalized form of violence: organized crime. Most existing research focuses on the impact of price shocks on wages and how this affects an individual’s opportunity cost to join an armed group or political movement. However, unlike other violent groups, organized criminal groups do not compete for political power, but profits in illegal markets. In Mexico, these groups have more than doubled in the past two decades, leading to an explosion of violence and record high 35,000 people being murdered in 2019. Mexican cartels engage in rent-seeking behavior in both licit and illicit markets, especially in rural areas where illicit crop cultivation supports the drug trade. In this paper I use a differences-in-differences strategy exploiting variation in avocado and illicit drug prices from 2003-2018 to understand how price shocks to both legal and illegal commodities impact cartel competition in different markets. I find rising avocado prices have a significant effect on violent crime in avocado-growing municipalities at the monthly level. Cartels also are more likely to enter an avocado-growing municipalities as prices increase, and less likely to leave them. Avocados may also be complementary to illicit crop cultivation

Anabolic steroids

This issue of eMedRef provides information to clinicians on the pathophysiology, diagnosis, and therapeutics of anabolic steroid use

Obesity in childhood

This issue of eMedRef provides information to clinicians on the pathophysiology, diagnosis, and therapeutics of obesity in childhood

Meconium aspiration syndrome

This issue of eMedRef provides information to clinicians on the pathophysiology, diagnosis, and therapeutics of meconium aspiration syndrome

Reducing gender bias in household consumption data: Implications for food fortification policy.

Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) data are increasingly used to inform nutrition policy around the world, most prominently for food fortification programs. However, they risk providing incorrect and gender-biased estimates of dietary intakes. We use both 7-day HCES and 24-hour dietary recall (24HR) data on all members of 5604 households in rural Bangladesh to disentangle the two main sources of error: 1) mismeasurement of household consumption, and 2) intra-household allocation assumptions used to individualize household consumption. We show that, relative to 24HR, HCES overestimate household-level quantities and underestimate women’s share of household foods. Errors from modeling the potential benefits and risks of fortification depend on the food – better measurement is needed for foods consumed episodically (e.g. wheat flour or sugar) or in small quantities (e.g. salt and oil). Beyond mean bias, we find poor and heteroskedastic agreement between HCES and 24HR methods, which is more driven by mismeasurement of food quantities than the application of flawed assumptions about food allocation – at least in the Bangladeshi context. We demonstrate a novel generalizable method for improving HCES intake estimates by drawing on the advantages of both HCES and 24HR data. Using a small sample of 24HR data to generate context- and food-specific quantity and allocation corrections, we can almost eliminate mean bias. With further validation, we hope our proposed method can be used to ensure that HCES estimates account for locally-specific measurement error and gender norms, and that nutrition policy based on these data will be safer and more gender-sensitive

Emergence and persistence of inefficient states

We present a theory of the emergence and persistence of inefficient states based on patronage politics. The society consists of rich and poor. The rich are initially in power, but expect to transition to democracy, which will choose redistributive policies. Taxation requires the employment of bureaucrats. By choosing an inefficient state structure, the rich may be able to use patronage and capture democratic politics, so reducing the amount of redistribution in democracy. Moreover, the inefficient state creates its own constituency and tends to persist over time. Intuitively, an inefficient state structure creates more rents for bureaucrats than would an efficient one. When the poor come to power in democracy, they will reform the structure of the state to make it more efficient so that higher taxes can be collected at lower cost and with lower rents for bureaucrats. Anticipating this, when the society starts out with an inefficient organization of the state, bureaucrats support the rich, who set lower taxes but also provide rents to bureaucrats. We obtain that the rich–bureaucrats coalition may also expand the size of bureaucracy excessively so as to generate enough political support. The model shows that an equilibrium with an inefficient state is more likely to arise when there is greater income inequality, when bureaucratic rents take intermediate values, and when individuals are sufficiently forward-lookin