Scholars have often argued that crime hinders growth, but the empirical literature assessing such an effect is scarce. By exploiting cross-municipal income and crime data for Mexico, in this study we find evidence indicating that drug-related crime indeed deters growth.

This paper proposes an extension of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition from two to a continuum of comparison groups. The proposed decomposition is then estimated for racial wage differences in urban Peru, exploiting a novel data set that allows the capturing of different degrees of mestizaje...