TY - JOUR
T1 - THE RISE AND PERSISTENCE OF ILLEGAL CROPS
T2 - EVIDENCE FROM A NAIVE POLICY ANNOUNCEMENT
AU - Prem, Mounu
AU - Vargas, Juan F.
AU - Mejía, Daniel
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Álvaro Balcazar, Andrés Bermudez, Gemma Dipoppa, Raymond Fisman, Francisco Gallego, Adam Isacson, Ethan Kapstein, Phil Keefer, Eliana La Ferrara, Jeanne Lafortune, Luis Martínez, Nicola Mas-trocco, Vincent Pons, Charu Prem, Pablo Querubín, Miguel Sarzosa, Jake Shapiro, Rodrigo Soares, Ernesto Stein, and seminar participants at the Chicago Harris Political Economy seminar, the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC)’s lab meeting, the 2020 Econometric Society World Congress, the Washington, DC, Political Economy Seminar of the Inter-American Development Bank, George Mason University’s Micro-Economic Policy Seminar, Purdue University, and Chile’s Catholic University for helpful comments and suggestions. Andrés Rivera and David Vargas provided excellent research assistance. We thank SIMCI-UNODC for facilitating access to the coca cultivation data. Vargas received funding from the Colombia Científica-Alianza EFI Research Program 60185 and contract No. FP44842-220-2018.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
PY - 2023/3
Y1 - 2023/3
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1162/rest_a_01059
DO - 10.1162/rest_a_01059
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85149950307
SN - 0034-6535
VL - 105
SP - 344
EP - 358
JO - Review of Economics and Statistics
JF - Review of Economics and Statistics
IS - 2
ER -