Judicial Incentives and Performance at Lower Courts: Evidence from Slovenian Judge-Level Data

Dimitrova‐Grajzl, Valentina; Grajzl, Peter; Šušteršič, Janez; Zajc, Katarina

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1930466

Cited by 7 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Furthermore, even after controlling for a range of case characteristics and judge fixed effects, cases where at least one party is a legal person tend to be deliberated on longer than cases where all involved parties are physical persons. These findings resonate with different subsets of the prior literature that has highlighted the importance of judge characteristics and extralegal factors for adjudicatory outcomes (see, e.g., Schneider 2005, Teitelbaum 2006, Choi et al 2011, Dimitrova-Grajzl et al 2012b, Danziger et al 2011, Ramseyer 2012, Schanzenbach 2015.…”

supporting

confidence: 82%

“…Indeed, an understanding of whether there exists a tradeoff between speed and quality in judicial decision-making is instrumental to sound policy-making. Accordingly, existing literature (see Posner 1996, Rosales-López 2008, Coviello et al 2015, Dimitrova-Grajzl et al 2012b has examined whether there exists a quantity-quality tradeoff in court case resolution. No contribution, however, has studied the relationship between the duration of judicial deliberation and measures of quality of judicial decisions.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The Duration of Judicial Deliberation: Evidence from Belgium

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Duration of Judicial Deliberation: Evidence from Belgium Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractWe utilize case-level data from a large Belgian court to study a policy-relevant but thus far empirically unexplored aspect of judicial behavior: the time that a judge takes to deliberate on a case before rendering a verdict. Exploiting the de facto random administrative assignment of filed cases among the serving judges and using survival analysis methods, we find that the duration of judicial deliberation varies not only with measures of case complexity, but also with judge and disputing party characteristics. We further find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that longer judicial deliberation improves the quality of judicial decisions.JEL-Codes: K400, K410, K490.

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confidence: 82%

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confidence: 99%

The Duration of Judicial Deliberation: Evidence from Belgium

et al. 2016

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“…Posner (1996: 172) in a comprehensive study of the U.S. federal appellate courts notes that there is no clear evidence of a reduction in adjudicatory quality, even though the courts' caseload, and hence output, have increased over time. Dimitrova-Grajzl et al (2012b), in contrast, draw on judge-level data from Slovenia and find that the presence (or absence) of the quantity-quality tradeoff in judicial decision-making varies across the different types of courts of first instance.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous studies on the topic (Posner 1996, Rosales-Lopez 2008, Dimitrova-Grajzl et al 2012b, Coviello et al 2014 find mixed results. We contribute to this debate by presenting new evidence from a judicial system in which increasing court output is viewed as an important policy goal and thus concerns about the potential adverse repercussions for quality of adjudication are especially relevant.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…To assess whether there is a quantity-quality tradeoff in judicial decision-making in Bulgaria, we follow the approach of Rosales-Lopez (2008) and Dimitrova-Grajzl et al (2012b). Applied to our court-level data, the essence of our statistical test is to examine if court-year observations for 26 which the number of case dispositions is large relative to the regression-estimated benchmark differ systematically in terms of the number of appealed cases (see, e.g., Mitsopoulos andPelagidis 2007, 2010;Coviello et al 2014) from the court-year observations for which the number of case dispositions is small relative to the regression-estimated benchmark.…”

Section: Empirical Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Courts in a transition economy: Case disposition and the quantity–quality tradeoff in Bulgaria

et al. 2016

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The lack of effective judiciary in post-socialist countries has been a pervasive concern and successful judicial reform an elusive goal. Yet to date, little empirical research exists on the functioning of courts in the post-socialist world. We draw on a new court-level panel dataset from Bulgaria to study the determinants of court case disposition and to evaluate whether judicial decision-making is subject to a quantity-quality tradeoff. Addressing endogeneity concerns, we find that case disposition in Bulgarian courts is largely driven by demand for court services. The number of serving judges, a key court resource, matters to a limited extent only in a subsample of courts, a result suggesting that judges adjust their productivity based on the number of judges serving at a court. We do not find evidence implying that increasing court productivity would decrease adjudicatory quality. We discuss the policy implications of our findings. Terms of use: Documents inJEL-Code: P370, K400, D020.

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Determinants of judges’ career choices and productivity: a Polish case study

et al. 2021

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The goal of this paper is to identify factors which affect judges’ productivity and career choice motives with the view of increasing judicial efficiency. Specifically, the investigation focuses on such aspects as judges’ remuneration, promotion, threat of judgment revocation, service/mission, periodic assessment, the threat of a complaint about protracted proceedings or of disciplinary proceedings, the threat of destabilization of the employment relationship, status/prestige of the profession, power/authority, social recognition, leisure, as well as administrative supervision and self-monitoring. To this end, a survey was conducted among judges of three of the largest Polish regional courts and subordinate district courts. The descriptive and statistical analyses show that judges’ care for the number of cases resolved, proxying for their productivity, is significantly correlated with self-monitoring of their adjudication activity. The stability of employment, the status/prestige of the profession and a relatively high remuneration are the most important factors in terms of judges’ career choices. In their care for the number of cases resolved remuneration is, albeit, no longer a relevant factor. Judges monitor their productivity due to reasons other than remuneration, possibly the sense of service/mission and the threat of various adverse consequences, the evidence for which is, however, also rather weak.

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Judicial Incentives and Performance at Lower Courts: Evidence from Slovenian Judge-Level Data

Cited by 7 publications

References 32 publications

The Duration of Judicial Deliberation: Evidence from Belgium

The Duration of Judicial Deliberation: Evidence from Belgium

Courts in a transition economy: Case disposition and the quantity–quality tradeoff in Bulgaria

Determinants of judges’ career choices and productivity: a Polish case study

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