The early origins of judicial stringency in bail decisions: Evidence from early childhood exposure to Hindu-Muslim riots in India

We estimate the causal effects of judges' exposure to communal violence during early childhood on pre-trial detention rates by exploiting novel administrative data on judgments and detailed resumes of judi-cial officers born during 1955-1991. Our key result is that judges exposed to communal violence between ages 0 and 6 years are 16% more prone to deny bail than the average judge, with the impact being stron-ger for the experience of riots between ages 3 and 6 years. The observed judicial stringency is driven by childhood exposure to riots with a higher duration of state-imposed lockdowns and low riot casualties. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).