IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tse/wpaper/127597.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Ramadan Fasting Increases Judicial Leniency in Judges from Pakistan and India

Author

Listed:
  • Mehmood, Sultan
  • Seror, Avner
  • Chen, Daniel L.

Abstract

We estimate the impact of the Ramadan fasting ritual on criminal sentencing decisions for Pakistan and India from half a century of daily data. We use random case assignment and exogenous variation in fasting intensity within Ramadan due to the rotating Islamic calendar and the geographical latitude of the district courts to document the large effects of Ramadan fasting on decision-making. Our sample comprises roughly a half million cases and 10,000 judges from Pakistan and India. Ritual intensity increases Muslim judges’ acquittal rates, lowers their appeal and reversal rates, and does not come at the cost of increased recidivism or heightened outgroup bias. Overall, our results indicate that the Ramadan fasting ritual followed by a billion Muslims worldwide induces more lenient decisions.

Suggested Citation

  • Mehmood, Sultan & Seror, Avner & Chen, Daniel L., 2022. "Ramadan Fasting Increases Judicial Leniency in Judges from Pakistan and India," TSE Working Papers 22-1393, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), revised Mar 2023.
  • Handle: RePEc:tse:wpaper:127597
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/wp/2022/wp_tse_1393.pdf
    File Function: Full Text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alberto Alesina & Eliana La Ferrara, 2014. "A Test of Racial Bias in Capital Sentencing," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(11), pages 3397-3433, November.
    2. Filipe Campante & David Yanagizawa-Drott, 2015. "Editor's Choice Does Religion Affect Economic Growth and Happiness? Evidence from Ramadan," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 130(2), pages 615-658.
    3. Chen, Daniel L. & Moskowitz, Tobias J. & Shue, Kelly, 2016. "Decision-Making Under the Gambler’s Fallacy: Evidence From Asylum Courts, Loan Officers, and Baseball Umpires," IAST Working Papers 16-43, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST).
    4. Daniel L. Chen & Tobias J. Moskowitz & Kelly Shue, 2016. "Decision Making Under the Gambler’s Fallacy: Evidence from Asylum Judges, Loan Officers, and Baseball Umpires," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 131(3), pages 1181-1242.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sultan Mehmood & Avner Seror & Daniel L. Chen, 2022. "Religious Rituals: Evidence from Ramadan," Working Papers hal-03899724, HAL.
    2. Chen, Daniel L. & Philippe, Arnaud, 2023. "Clash of norms judicial leniency on defendant birthdays," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 211(C), pages 324-344.
    3. Maria R. Ibanez & Michael W. Toffel, 2020. "How Scheduling Can Bias Quality Assessment: Evidence from Food-Safety Inspections," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 66(6), pages 2396-2416, June.
    4. James Wang, 2020. "Screening soft information: evidence from loan officers," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 51(4), pages 1287-1322, December.
    5. Benjamin Radoc, 2020. "Bandit with similarity information," Department of Economics, Ateneo de Manila University, Working Paper Series 202002, Department of Economics, Ateneo de Manila University.
    6. Benjamin Enke & Uri Gneezy & Brian Hall & David Martin & Vadim Nelidov & Theo Offerman & Jeroen van de Ven, 2020. "Cognitive Biases: Mistakes or Missing Stakes?," CESifo Working Paper Series 8168, CESifo.
    7. Anna Bindler & Randi Hjalmarsson, 2019. "Path Dependency in Jury Decision Making," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 17(6), pages 1971-2017.
    8. Gagnon-Bartsch, Tristan & Bushong, Benjamin, 2022. "Learning with misattribution of reference dependence," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 203(C).
    9. Oliphant, Wesley & Ma, Hong, 2021. "Applying Behavioral Economics to microcredit in China’s rural areas," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(C).
    10. He, Kevin, 2022. "Mislearning from censored data: The gambler's fallacy and other correlational mistakes in optimal-stopping problems," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 17(3), July.
    11. Deshpande Sameer K. & Wyner Abraham, 2017. "A hierarchical Bayesian model of pitch framing," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 13(3), pages 95-112, September.
    12. Chen, Daniel L., 2023. "Judicial compliance in district courts," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    13. Artiga González, Tanja & Calluzzo, Paul & Granic, Georg D., 2023. "Ballot order effects in independent director elections," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 39(C).
    14. Robert M. Lantis & Erik T. Nesson, 2019. "Hot Shots: An Analysis of the ‘Hot Hand’ in NBA Field Goal and Free Throw Shooting," NBER Working Papers 26510, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Daniel J. Benjamin, 2018. "Errors in Probabilistic Reasoning and Judgment Biases," NBER Working Papers 25200, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Jon Kleinberg & Annie Liang & Sendhil Mullainathan, 2017. "The Theory is Predictive, but is it Complete? An Application to Human Perception of Randomness," PIER Working Paper Archive 17-025, Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, revised 09 Aug 2017.
    17. Chen, Daniel L. & Dunn, Matt & Sagun, Levent & Sirin, Hale, 2017. "Early Predictability of Asylum Court Decisions," TSE Working Papers 17-781, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    18. Yulin Liu & Luyao Zhang, 2022. "Cryptocurrency Valuation: An Explainable AI Approach," Papers 2201.12893, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2023.
    19. Nicolas Lampach & Arthur Dyevre, 2020. "Choosing for Europe: judicial incentives and legal integration in the European Union," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 50(1), pages 65-86, August.
    20. Jonas Radbruch & Amelie Schiprowski, 2020. "Interview Sequences and the Formation of Subjective Assessments," ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series 045, University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    religious rituals; Ramadan; decision-making;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • N35 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - Asia including Middle East
    • O1 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development
    • Z12 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Religion

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tse:wpaper:127597. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/tsetofr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.