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Please Join the project on political Economy and Civil War for a Brown Bag Discussion
Tuesday, October 22nd
2:00pm - 3:30pm
Metropolitan Building 5183
In a principal-agent model where legal institutions are weak a potential behavioral response to the introduction of high-powered incentives may be the use of illegal methods to achieve a goal. We test this hypothesis by examining the introduction of high-powered incentives in the Colombian army in 2005 designed to encourage soldiers to catch or kill members of guerrilla or paramilitary groups. We show that this measure led to a dramatic increase in killings of civilians who were presented as members of non-state armed groups (called 'false positives' by the Colombian media). The number of false positives increased differentially in municipalities with low levels of judicial efficiency and where military units were controlled by officers with high promotion incentives. The number of false positives fell after 2008 when the media began to publicize this behavior and the high-powered incentives were removed.
Juan F. Vargas, PhD, is a Professor of Economics at Universidad del Rosario, Bogota, Colombia