Mauricio Drelichman

This thesis investigates crime and violence in Latin America. Each chapter tackles a differentaspect of this overarching theme.Chapter 1 examines the long-term impact of state violence on homicide rates. I analyze the caseof Guatemala’s civil war massacres, assembling data on their locations, and linking them to recenthomicide rates. Exploring precipitation variation as an instrument for massacres, I provide evidenceof an inverse relationship between past victimization and 2016-2019 homicide rates. I findthat generalized trust is higher in municipalities with more massacres, which suggests increasedlocal cohesion as a channel connecting past violence with reduced crime rates.In Chapter 2, I investigate police behaviour in Guatemala from 1970-1985, a period markedby authoritarianism and limited state capacity. By applying Optical Character Recognition (OCR)technology, I scrutinize over 300,000 scanned documents, creating a valuable dataset for futureresearch. I find that power transitions were followed by an increase in detentions, but these werenot targeted against political dissidents. One explanation for this pattern is that the State, whenweaker, provided more crime-fighting services to the population, possibly as a way to win publicsupport. Analyzing the civilian demand side of police work, I find that a significant portion ofcivilian-initiated interactions focuses on lost ID pieces, rather than regular or political crimes.In Chapter 3, I investigate the divergence in homicide rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous areas following the surge in violence due to the drug war in Mexico. Since 2007, asignificant disparity emerged in homicide rates between municipalities with a majority Indigenouspopulation and those without. I show that the presence of Indigenous majority is associated withresilience against major Drug Trade Organizations (DTOs). I present a theoretical model showingthat elevated entry barriers in specific territories reduce their attractiveness, making them lessprone to host DTOs and the conflicts they bring. I hypothesize that political and cultural barriersto entry may be particularly elevated in areas with ethnic autonomy institutions. In accordancewith the model, I find that, within Indigenous-majority areas, those with autonomous institutionsreported smaller increases in homicides.

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Chapter 1 examines the importance of public education to occupational outcomes and intergenerational mobility. The UK's 1870 Education Act, which introduced a public education system in England and Wales, provides a unique historical context in which to explore this. Using newly digitized historical records and a regression kink design, I find that public school access improved a child's chance of obtaining an occupation requiring literacy in adulthood by as much as 13 pp. To study the reform's effect on intergenerational mobility, I link father-son pairs across time using full-count historical censuses. I find that by targeting the lower classes, public school introduction significantly improved intergenerational mobility, decreasing the adult outcome gap between high- and low- class children by over 10%. Chapter 2 demonstrates how legislation can change the incentives for human capital accumulation in resource-dependant communities, and in doing so help insure against future resource busts. I examine the UK's 1860 Mining Act, which made literacy or schooling a prerequisite for children seeking to work in mines. Using a triple difference specification and full-count census records linked across decades, I find that by decreasing the opportunity cost and increasing the returns to schooling, the Act led to increased human capital acquisition among the children of coal miners. This improved their likelihood of holding human capital-intensive occupations in adulthood, particularly among children residing in parishes that subsequently experienced mining busts. Chapter 3 explores the effects conflict continues to have on labour and marriage markets even after the shooting stops. Using variation in First World War death rates across British communities, I find higher conflict death rates are associated with a fall in poverty, particularly among men, and an increase in employment, particularly among women. Together, these results suggest that while high death rates improved labour market conditions for those left behind, widowed women were likely forced into the labour market to avoid poverty. Finally, I demonstrate that war-induced falls in the sex-ratio led to increases in out-of-wedlock births, confirming previous findings showing that men often utilize marriage market bargaining power to shirk childcare responsibility.

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Economic development is characterized by the expansion of interpersonal trade which requires the institutions for contract enforcement. In order to sustain trade at a greater scale, a society needs to develop the formal institutions that can enforce contracts between strangers. Hence, economic development can be characterized by the development of formal institutions. My PhD dissertation seeks to identify factors that cause the transition from the kinship based or informal institutions to the law based or formal institutions. In order to compare the process of transition in a now developed country with that in a developing country, one case study from early modern England and one from colonial India are considered. In the context of early modern England, my thesis identifies such a transition in the credit and the legal institutions. I find that the increase in social heterogeneity in early modern England rendered the informal institutions ineffective and induced people to move to the formal institutions for resolving disputes. Consequently, formal institutions developed following a 'learning by doing' mechanism. I develop a theoretical model that attempts to capture the historical accounts of this process, and generates some testable implications which I test using the archival data from The National Archive, England. The historical evidence is consistent with my model's predictions. The study on early modern England, in my dissertation, is complemented by a study on Nattukottai Chettiars, a major banking caste from South India. In the first quarter of the twentieth century some of the Chettiar Bankers switched from caste based banking to joint stock banking. I analyze this transition using a theoretical model, and provide historical evidence in support of my analysis. A general pattern of transition emerges from the case studies. The informal institutions have advantage in processing information flowing through the community networks. A society moves from the informal to the formal institutions when the informal institutions lose that edge. In the English case, the informal institutions lost the edge because of increasing social heterogeneity while in the Indian case the improvements in communication technology caused the transition.

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