Faith in Action: Does Ramadan Reduce Crime?

As a social institution, religion creates incentives or disincentives for ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ social behaviour, including attitudes towards participation in criminal activities. The size of such an effect depends on the intensity of socio-religious norms regarding specific forms of crime. Ramadan, a period of heightened religiosity among Muslims, involves expectations regarding socially desirable behaviour among individuals. Ramadan also involves mandated fasting, which affects local economic activity. How do such expectations and religious restructuring of daily life affect the incidence of crime among believers directly and/or indirectly? Using a difference-in-differences methodology and information from a unique dataset of criminal offences, we estimate the impact of Ramadan on criminal offences committed by those affected by it. Our identification strategy leverages the shifting timing of Ramadan through the Gregorian calendar to isolate the causal effect from confounding seasonality. We find that Ramadan leads to economically and statistically significant reductions in both violent and non-violent crimes, with estimated effect sizes ranging from 8 to 23 percent. We find suggestive evidence of these results being mediated by changes in religiosity and associated behavioural norms rather than by labour market channels. Our results provide suggestive evidence that informal institutions, such as religion, may complement formal state institutions in efforts to reduce crime.