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Violent crime in Mexico occurs at a rate that dwarfs the human costs of most contemporary civil wars, and the drug cartels responsible for the violence exercise de facto control over significant geographical territories. In this respect, the Mexican “drug wars” resemble conflicts over the control of rich natural resources in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, blurring the distinction between “political” and “social” or “criminal” violence. In the civil war literature, a young age structure has been argued to provide inexpensive rebel labor and thus increase opportunities for a rebel group to wage war against a government. Similarly, relatively large groups of “idle” young men could arguably be a factor that reduces recruitment costs for criminal enterprises through the abundant supply of youth with low opportunity cost. Acknowledging organized crime around drug trafficking as a major cause of crime and violence in Mexico, we ask whether the availability of large young male cohorts, or male “youth bulges”, low education and high youth unemployment ease the recruitment to these organizations and may contribute to explain variance in violent crime rates across Mexican states over time. Using panel data covering 32 states in Mexico during the 1997–2010 period, we find that, while a coarse measure of regional youth bulges is not associated with patterns of violent youth crime, high youth unemployment in low-education strata is, in particular in the context of large male youth bulges. These results remain robust against alternative data, sample size, estimation techniques and controls for potential endogeneity concerns.

Over the past five years public security in Mexico started to become one of the first problems for civil society and authorities. Analysts have warned that insecurity is spreading to regions that were previously unaffected. Applying spatial econometrics techniques, this paper empirically investigates whether and how drug related crime in a given Mexican state spreads to its neighboring states. Using a panel data set for the 31 Mexican federal states and Mexico City over the period 1997-2010 the papers finds a positive and significant diffusion effect of crimes related to drugs after controlling for political and socio-economic characteristics of regions. These findings take into account the endogeneity inherent to the spatial autoregression implementing a 2SLS estimation procedure and are robust to the selection of the spatial lag weighting matrix. Furthermore, after controlling for drug enforcement in neighboring states to state i, the results show weak evidence for a deterrent effect. This implies that authorities' deterrence measures in neighboring states to state i weakly reduce drug crimes in state i.■ Resumen: Durante los últimos cinco años la seguridad pública en México ha empezado a ser uno de los principales problemas para la sociedad civil y las autoridades. Analistas han advertido que la inseguridad se esta extendiendo a regiones que anteriormente no eran afectadas. Utilizando técnicas de econometría espacial el presente artículo investiga si y cómo el crimen de drogas en un determinado estado de México se extiende a sus estados vecinos. Se utilizan datos panel para los 31 estados mexicanos y la Ciudad de México durante el periodo 1997-2010. Contralando por las características políticas y socioeconómicas de las regiones de México, se encuentra un efecto de contagio positivo y significativo de

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