Claire Oxford ’14

Sarah Pearlman & Sukanya Basu

For my Ford Scholars project, I am working on recoding data and analyzing the relationship between drug-related violence and migration in Mexico with Professors Sukanya Basu and Sarah Pearlman. Professors Basu and Pearlman are working on a paper that uses kilometers of federal toll highway in Mexico as an instrumental variable to measure violence-related migration. For the Ford project, I am assisting with research to break their state-level analysis down to a municipal level. Ultimately, the project is meant to show that using federal toll highway kilometers to instrument for changes in homicides, which they have shown is significant on a statewide level, works on a municipal level as well. Most of the data used for the project comes from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI). I collected municipal level homicide, population, and migration data. After downloading the data sets from INEGI, I created STATA do-files to merge the data and create dummy variables to use in regressions. Additionally, I created maps of Mexico that showed the geographic distribution of the violence; see Image 1 for an example of these maps. Furthermore, I assisted with additional research by reading contemporary economic papers also examining the drug-related violence in Mexico. Our initial results suggest that the relationship between drug-related violence and migration holds on a municipal level. Furthermore, we see that the highway kilometers instrument still works. We still have additional work to do in determining what controls we want to use and whether or not we want to look at the total homicides per capita in a municipality as a measure of violence, or if we want to look at the change in homicides as a measure of the increase in violence as a result of the war on drugs.

Figure 1