The Effect of Natural Resource Shocks on Violence, Crime, and Drug Cartels Presence in Mexico
We examine the effect of natural resource shocks on violence by drug cartels at the municipality level in rural Mexico from 2003 to 2017. For this, we use an Instrumental Variable setup by instrumenting our main explanatory variable vegetation density with rainfall. Vegetation density is an indicator for natural resource shocks and reflects the “greenness" in a particular area which is consid