google trends

The authors ask when organized criminal groups respond to opportunities in licit commodity markets with violence. Their central contribution is to link rapid increases in a good’s share of global export value to incentives for criminal expansion, and to assemble evidence at both subnational and cross-national levels to test that mechanism. The paper uses avocado exports in Mexico as a detailed case and then combines international datasets to examine whether agricultural export booms correspond with higher homicide where organized crime exists.

A new 'variance-in-time' method uses Google Trends (GT) to detect and forecast events by collecting multiple, overlapping GT samples over time. The algorithm leverages variation in both the mean and the variance of a search term to accommodate idiosyncrasies in the GT platform.