We develop a model explaining how criminal organizations strategically use pre-electoral violence as a way of influencing electoral results and politicians' behaviour. We then characterize the incentives to use such violence under different levels of electoral competition and different electoral rules. Our theory is consistent with the empirical evidence within Sicily and across Italian regions. Specifically, the presence of organized crime is associated with abnormal spikes in violence against politicians before elections-particularly when the electoral outcome is more uncertain-which in turn reduces voting for parties opposed by criminal organizations. Using a very large data set of parliamentary debates, we also show that violence by the Sicilian Mafia reduces anti-Mafia efforts by members of parliament appointed in Sicily, particularly from the parties that traditionally oppose the Mafia.

We estimate impacts of male job loss, female job loss, and male unemployment benefits on domestic violence (DV) in Brazil. We merge individual-level employment and welfare registers with different measures of DV: judicial cases brought to criminal courts, the use of public shelters by victims, and mandatory DV notifications by health providers. Leveraging mass layoffs for identification, we first show that both male and female job loss, independently, lead to large, and pervasive increases in DV. Using a regression discontinuity design, we then show that access to unemployment benefits does not reduce DV while benefits are being paid, and it leads to higher DV risk once benefits expire. Our findings can be explained by the negative income shock brought by job loss and by increased exposure of victims to perpetrators, as partners tend to spend more time together after displacement. Although unemployment benefits partially offset the income drop following job loss, they reinforce the exposure shock as they increase unemployment duration. Since our results cannot be explained by prominent DV theories, we propose a simple model formalizing these mechanisms.