Moamen Gouda

The Long-Term Effect of Slavery on Violent Crime: Evidence from US Counties

This study investigates the long-term relationship between slavery and violence in USA. Although considerable qualitative evidence suggests that slavery has been a key factor behind the prevalence of violence, especially in Southern USA, there has been no large-N study supporting this claim so far. Using county-level data for the USA, we find that the proportion of slaves in the population in 1860 is associated with significantly higher rates of violent crime in all census years for the period 1970-2000. This relationship is robust to including state fixed effects, controlling for numerous historical and contemporary factors, as well as to instrumenting for slavery using environmental conditions. We explore two potential channels of transmission: (1) slavery leading to higher levels of inequality, which in turn lead to higher levels of violent crime, and (2) slavery contributing to an ingrained culture of Southern violence. Our results show that only the proportion of slaves living on large slave holdings, as opposed to small slave holdings, is related to contemporary violent crime, supporting inequality as a channel of transmission. We find some tentative evidence supporting culture of violence between the white and black population as a second channel of transmission.

Religious Loyalty and Acceptance of Corruption

This study investigates the relationship between religiously-induced internalized values of individuals and their specific attitudes regarding the acceptance of corruption. The dataset on which our study is based was collected by the World Values Survey from 141,326 individuals in 78 countries surveyed during a period of 13 years. We propose that individual attitudes towards corruption and religion are associated given certain societal and institutional contexts. Our results show that although there is a negative and statistically significant effect of religiosity on the acceptance of corruption on the individual level, this effect is small. We find that there is a threshold value of religiosity below which corruption is more easily accepted by individuals. Our interpretation for this result is simple: individuals with minimal religiosity are generally less constrained by religious norms; specifically, religious norms that are opposed to corruption are less binding on these individuals, resulting in them having a greater propensity to accept corruption. Religiosity, therefore, does lower the acceptance of corruption only when it exceeds a certain threshold for a specific individual.

Enforcing IPR Through Informal Institutions: The Possible Role of Religion in Fighting Software Piracy

The existence of formal IPR laws can be considered a prerequisite for having efficient law enforcement but does not imply efficient enforcement in itself. A simple model is constructed to explain the interplay between the IPR law and human behavior within counterfeiting countries. It shows how a politically monitored IPR enforcement strategy is able to alter formal IPR laws or institutions but might not affect informal institutions, or human morals and behavior, to the same extent, hence barely affecting piracy situation. The model shows the essential role of informal institutions and its sanction mechanisms in the enforcement process. The main obstacle of IPR enforcement is that people are still not convinced that IPR violations are unethical. Religion can be considered an informal institution that might support or hinder formal laws issued with regards to IPR and hence influence de facto enforcement of laws, especially in countries with high piracy rate if a high adherence to religion is found. As the Religion-Loyalty Index (RLI) developed by this study shows, Muslim countries have the highest religiosity level among different religions. Consequently, an investigation of how Islamic jurisprudence views IPR piracy is conducted. As Islam generally prohibits IPR piracy, a set of policy recommendations based on new institutional perspective is presented that can effectively help in minimizing IPR piracy in developing countries in general and Muslim ones in specific.

How Muslims Understand Democracy: An Empirical Investigation

This study examines how Muslims understand democracy and its essential components. We hypothesize that, although Muslims tend to value democracy as high as non-Muslims, Muslims may have a unique understanding of procedural, as well as substantive, components of democracy, which is significantly different from non-Muslims. Employing the latest data from World Values Survey, our descriptive statistics suggest that while Muslims highly value democracy, and believe they don’t have enough of it, their notion of democracy is distinct from that of non-Muslims. Muslims tend to associate democracy with its perceived outcomes, and do not have a substantial reservation against the interference of the army or religious authorities in the governing process. On the other hand, they view procedural aspects of democracy, such as elections, civil rights and gender equality, as less essential than their non-Muslim counterparts. We then use ordered logit regression model, controlling for various macro-, as well as micro-level determinants of democracy. Our regression results show that the determinants of Muslims’ attitudes towards democracy, and its different notions, are considerably distinct from those of non-Muslims.

Muslim Youth Unemployment and Expat Jihadism - Bored to Death?

ABSTRACT Empirical studies analyzing the push factors of expat jihadism are scarce and typically give contradictory results. We hypothesize that youth unemployment, as opposed to overall unemployment, is a significant determinant of foreign fighters flow to join the Islamic State. Moreover, we also consider the interaction between youth unemployment and the Muslim population share as another meaningful variables affecting expat jihadism. Controlling for several variables including gross domestic product per capita; Gini; geographical proximity; the share of manufactures and services as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product; Polity score; and fractionalization, we provide strong evidence for the hypothesis that Muslim youth unemployment is a driver of expat jihadism not only for Muslim-majority countries, but globally.