Person:
Sergenti, Ernest John

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Political economy of development, Economic growth, Econometrics, Ethnic violence and civil war
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Last updated: July 8, 2025
Biography
Ernest Sergenti worked as a Consultant at the World Bank in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and South Asia regions. Prior to that, Ernest was a Harvard-MIT Data Center Research Fellow and Statistical Consultant at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He  holds a PhD in Political Science with concentrations in Political Economy and Econometrics from New York University, and a Master of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics. Ernest is a co-author of several publications on political party competition, economic growth, and ethnic violence and civil war, including articles in the Journal of Political Economy and American Journal of Political Science.

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2020 - 202522000 - 20191
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    Climate Change Negotiations under the Shadow of History
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-02) Banuri, Sheheryar; Nguyen, Ha; Sergenti, Ernest J.
    Climate change is a global challenge requiring unprecedented levels of collective action. In this context, this paper asks: do appeals to historical responsibility facilitate or hinder collective action? This paper uses a simple lab experiment simulating climate mitigation bargaining between high- and low-income countries. A key design feature is that the need for mitigation is triggered based on historical actions that were undertaken without knowledge of their impact on the environment (and hence, the need for mitigation). Two treatment arms were conducted, a baseline where the cause for mitigation (past actions) is not revealed, and a treatment—“the shadow of history”—where the historical origins of the problem are made explicit. In both conditions, negotiations take place regarding contributions to a mitigation fund (i.e., collective action). Results show that revealing the shadow of history marginally increases average contributions, but the distribution of those contributions changes markedly. When made aware of the historical causes of the climate problem, low-income countries significantly reduce their contributions, while high-income countries contribute more—offsetting the reduction. Critically, the overall welfare of low-income countries increases, while it decreases for high-income countries. Moreover, results from textual analysis of chat data show greater tension when historical responsibility is made explicit, with more negative sentiment and adversarial conversations. These results suggest that appealing to historical responsibility appears to be a successful negotiations tactic for poor countries.
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    A New State of Mind: Greater Transparency and Accountability in the Middle East and North Africa
    (Washington, DC : World Bank, 2022-10-05) Belhaj, Ferid; Gatti, Roberta; Lederman, Daniel; Sergenti, Ernest John; Lotfi, Rana; Mousa, Mennatallah Emam; Assem, Hoda
    The MENA region is facing important vulnerabilities, which the current crises—first the pandemic, then the war in Ukraine—have exacerbated. Prices of food and energy are higher, hurting the most vulnerable, and rising interest rates from the global tightening of monetary policy are making debt service more burdensome. Part I explores some of the resulting vulnerabilities for MENA. MENA countries are facing diverging paths for future growth. Oil Exporters have seen windfall increases in state revenues from the rise in hydrocarbon prices, while oil importers face heightened stress and risk—from higher import bills, especially for food and energy, and the depreciation of local currencies in some countries. Part II of this report argues that poor governance, and, in particular, the lack of government transparency and accountability, is at the root of the region’s development failings—including low growth, exclusion of the most disadvantaged and women, and overuse of such precious natural resources as land and water.
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    Economic Growth and Ethnic Violence : An Empirical Investigation of Hindu-Muslim Riots in India
    (2010) Bohlken, Anjali Thomas; Sergenti, Ernest John
    Most studies of Hindu-Muslim riots in India have tended to emphasize the effects of social, cultural, or political factors on the occurrence of ethnic violence. In this article, the authors focus on the relationship between economic conditions and riots. Specifically, this article examines the effect of economic growth on the outbreak of Hindu-Muslim riots in 15 Indian states between 1982 and 1995. Controlling for other factors, the authors find that just a 1% increase in the growth rate decreases the expected number of riots by over 5%. While short-term changes in growth influence the occurrence of riots, this study finds no evidence of a relationship between the levels of wealth in a state and the incidence of ethnic riots. Moreover, by including state fixed effects, the authors determine that the negative relationship found between economic growth and riots is driven primarily by the relationship between growth and riots within a state over time rather than across states. These results are robust to controlling for a number of other factors such as economic inequality, demographic variables, political competition, temporal lags, spillover effects from adjacent states, and year effects. Finally, to address potential concerns that economic growth could be a consequence rather than a cause of violence or that other unobserved factors could confound the relationship between economic growth and the occurrence of Hindu-Muslim riots, the authors also employ instrumental variables (IV) estimation, using percentage change in rainfall as an instrument for growth. The results with IV estimation are similar to the results with non-IV estimation in terms of sign and significance, indicating that the negative effect of economic growth on riots is not due to reverse causality or omitted variables bias.