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  3. Non-economic factors in violence: Evidence from organized crime, suicides and climate in Mexico

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Artículo en revista académica

Non-economic factors in violence: Evidence from organized crime, suicides and climate in Mexico

  • person

    Felipe González; 

    Ceren Baysan; Marshall Burke; Solomon Hsiang; Edward Miguel

  • class Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, December 2019. Vol. 168. Pages 434-452

Abstract: Organized intergroup violence is almost universally modeled as a calculated act motivated by economic factors. In contrast, it is generally assumed that non-economic factors, such as an individual’s emotional state, play a role in many types of interpersonal violence, such as “crimes of passion.” We ask whether economic or non-economic factors better explain the well established relationship between temperature and violence in a unique context where intergroup killings by drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs) and “normal” interpersonal homicides are separately documented. A constellation of evidence, including the limited influence of a cash transfer program as well as comparison with both non-violent DTO crime and suicides, indicate that economic factors only partially explain the observed relationship between temperature and violence. We argue that non-economic psychological and physiological factors that are affected by temperature, modeled here as a “taste for violence,” likely play an important role in causing both interpersonal and intergroup violence.