Impact of violence-related homicides on life expectancy and years of life lost in Mexico

In recent years, Mexico has experienced unprecedented uprising levels of violence that has been attributed to increasing law enforcement on drug trafficking organization within the country. While the vast majority of this violence has been concentrated in a group of municipalities, particularly in the central Pacific coast and northern Mexico, it has raised very serious concerns on the fact that young adults have been disproportionally exposed to homicide death as compared to other age groups. Using a combination of vital statistics and Census data, the main purpose of this research is to estimate the impact of the upsurge of homicides on life expectancy. Specifically, this study will focus on estimating years of life lost (YLL) by age group, gender, and geographic area. To avoid aggregation issues in the calculations that may result from providing the results at state level, the empirical analysis implies the estimation of life expectancy in small areas considering municipalities as unit of analysis. Thus, municipalities are classified by its quintile distribution resulted from homicides levels during the period 2006-2010.