We study the protest behavior of teenagers linked to a student killed by a stray bullet coming from a policeman in Chile. We use administrative data to follow the schoolmates of the victim and those living near the shooting on hundreds of protest and nonprotest days. We find that police violence causes lower protest participation in street rallies but more adherence to test boycotts. These effects appear among schoolmates of the victim and not among students living near the killing. Negative educational consequences suffered by the schoolmates combined with previous results suggest that psychological mechanisms are a plausible explanation.

Policies based on prohibition and repression to fight the war on drugs have largely failed in a variety of contexts. However, incentive-based policies may also fail and have unintended negative consequences if policymakers do not properly anticipate behavioral reactions. This is an particularly important concern in the case of policies announced prior to their implementation. In this paper, we show that a naive and untimely policy announcement generated an unprecedented escalation in cocaine production in Colombia, offsetting almost 20 years and billions of dollars of U.S.-backed efforts to stop drug production and cartel action.