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Fighting Crime with a Little Help from my Friends: Political Alignment, Inter-Jurisdictional Cooperation and Crime in Mexico

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  • Gutierrez, Emilio

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between inter-jurisdictional cooperation and law enforcement in Mexico. Exploiting a Regression Discontinuity Design in close municipal elections, we study how improved opportunities for cooperation in crime prevention among neighboring municipalities - proxied by the degree of political alignment between mayors - may result in lower rates of violent crime. We find that municipalities in which the party in power in the majority of neighboring jurisdictions barely won experience significantly lower homicide rates during the mayor's mandate than those in which it barely lost. This effect is sizeable and robust, is increasing in the share of neighboring municipalities governed by the same party, is independent of which party governs the neighboring municipalities, and does not appear to be driven by improved cooperation with either federal or state authorities.

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  • Gutierrez, Emilio, 2015. "Fighting Crime with a Little Help from my Friends: Political Alignment, Inter-Jurisdictional Cooperation and Crime in Mexico," CEPR Discussion Papers 10769, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:10769
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    Cited by:

    1. Galletta, Sergio, 2017. "Law enforcement, municipal budgets and spillover effects: Evidence from a quasi-experiment in Italy," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 101(C), pages 90-105.
    2. Colombo, Andrea & Tojerow, Ilan, 2020. "Appointed or Elected? How Mayoral Accountability Impacts the Provision of Policing," IZA Discussion Papers 13961, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Crime; Inter-jurisdictional cooperation; Law enforcement; Mexico; Political parties;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government
    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
    • H7 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations

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