Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/311391 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Series/Report no.: 
GLO Discussion Paper No. 1569
Publisher: 
Global Labor Organization (GLO), Essen
Abstract: 
Violence is often viewed as an intrinsic feature of illicit markets, driven by competition, disputes, and predation. We argue that the connection between violence and markets is not exclusive to illicit markets and that in the absence of strong institutions these factors exist ubiquitously. Using an estimator of spatial concentration, we document the empirical relationship between violence and markets in the 14th century. We then employ a large language model to analyze the coroner's accounts of the era's homicides, finding that many of these incidents were driven by avoidable escalations of business-related disputes. Employing a novel difference-in-differences estimator for spatial concentration, we proceed to causally identify the impacts of the introduction of London's first professional police force in the 19th century on this concentration. We find that the police force's introduction led to a 54% reduction in the degree of concentration of violence around marketplaces. Our findings suggest that it is not the nature of the commodities being sold in illicit markets that drives violence, but is rather the absence of formal institutions of enforcement and dispute resolution.
Subjects: 
marketplace violence, medieval violence
spatial concentration
local large language model
JEL: 
K42
N93
R12
C21
K40
N90
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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