Fuelling Organised Crime: the Mexican War on Drugs and Oil Theft
研究发现墨西哥打击毒品的行动迫使贩毒集团大规模转向石油盗窃，挑战者集团在新领域超越老牌集团，且政治因素影响盗窃分布，但未引发暴力激增，却导致社会经济状况恶化。
Abstract We show that the Mexican war on drugs pushed drug cartels into large-scale oil theft. We propose a simple model in which government crackdowns on one criminal sector induce criminal organisations to invest in a new sector. When entering the new sector, challenger organisations with a residual share of the market in the traditional sector may leapfrog incumbent organisations. We bring the model to the data using detailed information on drug cartel presence, oil pipelines and illegal oil taps across Mexican municipalities. In line with the model predictions, municipalities with oil pipelines witnessed a greater increase in cartel presence than municipalities without pipelines after the crackdown on drugs, and the effect is driven by challenger criminal groups. Within the subset of municipalities with oil pipelines, we observe more illegal oil taps where the political party in favour of anti-drug trafficking policy won local elections by a small margin. Because of specialisation in different criminal sectors, municipalities with pipelines did not witness a surge in violence, but they did experience a decline in socioeconomic conditions.