“Ramadan Fasting Increases Leniency in Judges from Pakistan and India”, 2023-03-13 ():
[failure to replicate “hungry judges”] We estimate the impact of the Ramadan fasting ritual on criminal sentencing decisions in Pakistan and India from half a century of daily data.
We use random case assignment and exogenous variation in fasting intensity during 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.
…Our main result is that Muslim judges are about 10% more likely to acquit with each additional hour of fasting relative to the baseline minimum hours of fasting during Ramadan. This holds for both Pakistan and India (Table 1). In Pakistan, another hour of fasting is associated with acquittals being 4 percentage points more likely, while in India, another hour of fasting is associated with acquittals being 7 percentage points more likely. Figure 1 reports a stark jump in acquittals for Muslim judges in Pakistan with increasing Ramadan fasting intensity. The association between daylight hours and acquittals is present only in the month of Ramadan, not in other months. Moreover, in Figure 1, we observe no effect of fasting intensity on rulings by non-Muslim judges, our placebo group. We present the corresponding figure for India in the appendix (Supplementary Figure 4), where we find that the Ramadan effect for Muslim judges persists for several months after Ramadan.