Related papers: Reducing Cartel Violence: The Mexican Dilemma Betw…
Every year, Mexican cartels lose many members due to conflict with other cartels and arrests. Yet, despite their losses, cartels have managed to increase violence for years. We address this puzzle by leveraging data on the number of…
This paper is a comment to a recent paper which appeared in Science, presenting a mathematical model of the size distribution, in terms of manpower, of the drugs cartels in Mexico. I show that the model is undetermined and that the main…
One of the core strategies to reduce cartel violence is by directly targeting members with law enforcement. Whether targeting leaders, disrupting parts of the organisation, or incarcerating members, the purpose is to reduce the strength of…
Malicious softwares or malwares for short have become a major security threat. While originating in criminal behavior, their impact are also influenced by the decisions of legitimate end users. Getting agents in the Internet, and in…
Protracted conflict is one of the largest human challenges that have persistently undermined economic and social progress. In recent years, there has been increased emphasis on using statistical and physical science models to better…
Mexico has experienced a notable surge in assassinations of political candidates and mayors. This article argues that these killings are largely driven by organized crime, aiming to influence candidate selection, control local governments…
The interplay between criminal organizations and law enforcement disruption strategies is crucial in criminology. Criminal enterprises, like legitimate businesses, balance visibility and security to thrive. This study uses evolutionary game…
Human trafficking is a heartless crime that represents the second most profitable crime in the world. Mexico's geographical position makes it a country with high levels of human trafficking. Using the snowball sampling method, the major…
This paper presents and discusses a mathematical model inspired by control theory to derive optimal public policies for minimizing costs associated with the reduction and control of criminal activity in a population. Specifically, we…
The international financial system is currently not yet prepared to face a foreseeable crisis mainly motivated by the dichotomy between the real economy and the virtual economy. Skepticism is widespread even when it comes to investments in…
We examine how violence affects migration flows and, crucially, how it reshapes the strength of migration networks -- measured by the intensity of migration between areas, accounting for the fact that some routes become more prominent or…
Price of anarchy quantifies the degradation of social welfare in games due to the lack of a centralized authority that can enforce the optimal outcome. At its antipodes, mechanism design studies how to ameliorate these effects by…
Containing the spreading of crime in urban societies remains a major challenge. Empirical evidence suggests that, left unchecked, crimes may be recurrent and proliferate. On the other hand, eradicating a culture of crime may be difficult,…
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a policy making crisis where efforts to slow down or end the pandemic conflict with economic priorities. This paper provides mathematical analysis of optimal disease control policies with idealized…
Frequent emergence of communicable diseases has been a major concern worldwide. Lack of sufficient resources to mitigate the disease-burden makes the situation even more challenging for lower-income countries. Hence, strategy development…
In the United States the laws regulating the carrying of firearms in public vary state-to-state. In a highly publicized event, the Governor of New Mexico recently issued an emergency order temporarily banning the carrying of firearms in…
The control of large queueing networks is a notoriously difficult problem. Recently, an interesting new policy design framework for the control problem called h-MaxWeight has been proposed: h-MaxWeight is a natural generalization of the…
This article estimates the impact of violence on emigration crossings from Guatemala to Mexico as final destination during 2009-2017. To identify causal effects, we use as instruments the variation in deforestation in Guatemala, and the…
The last decades have seen a resurgence of armed conflict globally, renewing the need for durable peace agreements. In this paper, I evaluate the economic effects of the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the largest…
Cyber attacks continue to be a cause of concern despite advances in cyber defense techniques. Although cyber attacks cannot be fully prevented, standard decision-making frameworks typically focus on how to prevent them from succeeding,…