Understanding the Time to Court Case Resolution: A Competing Risks Analysis Using Belgian Data

Bielen, Samantha; Grajzl, Peter; Marneffe, Wim

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2847109

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…Previous empirical research has similarly been split over the effect of judicial tenure on case disposition time (see e.g. Bielen et al 2016; Christensen and Szmer 2012).…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our choice of such variables follows the design of previous case-level studies (see e.g. Bielen et al 2016; Christensen and Szmer 2012; Grajzl and Zajc 2016). We distinguish between cases from the following fields of law by coding suitable dummy variables: contract law (L_CONTRACT), tort law (L_TORTS), tenancy law (L_TENANCY), traffic law (L_TRAFFIC), and other fields of law (L_OTHER).…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Determinants of in-court settlements: empirical evidence from a German trial court

Berlemann

Christmann

2018

Journal of Institutional Economics

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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. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may Zusammenfassung / AbstractBecause verdicts are typically the more costly resolution of legal disputes, most governments are interested in high settlement rates. In this paper, we use a unique dataset of 860 case records from a German trial court to explore which factors have a significant impact on the decision to settle in civil law litigation. We find that case-specific factors, procedural aspects and individual characteristics of the involved judge have a significant impact on settlement probability. Interestingly, we find supporting evidence for the hypothesis that the gender of the involved judge has an impact on settlement probabilities in certain subfields of law. Based on our empirical results, we derive some conclusions for legal policies that aim at increasing settlement rates. To be able to construct legal systems that facilitate early settlements of legal disputes, it is necessary to identify the factors that have a significant impact on settlement probability. 1 However, little empirical knowledge is available on this issue as yet. A major reason for the scarcity of empirical evidence on the determinants of settlement probability is that suitable data to study this issue are often unavailable. Databases on verdicts are often available; however, according to the well-established Case Selection Hypothesis put forward by PRIEST and KLEIN (1984), verdicts (and thus settlements) are not a random draw from the pool of all legal disputes. Empirical evidence that is solely based on verdict databases is thus likely biased. To gain unbiased evidence on the determinants of settlement probability, a random sample of legal disputes that contains both court decisions and settlements is necessary. However, these types of data are mostly unavailable as yet.In this paper, we contribute to filling the described gap in the literature. Using a novel, hand-collected dataset consisting of 860 case records from a German trial court, we employ the logit regression technique to identify factors that influence the probability of 1 Note that we do not argue that promoting settlements is in fact always s ocially efficient. For critical assessments of settlements and judicial discretion to achieve them, see, e.g., RESNIK (2002) The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 reviews the related literature. Section 3 introduces and summarizes the dataset. In section 4, we report the empirical results of our analysis ...

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“…Previous empirical research has similarly been split over the effect of judicial tenure on case disposition time (see e.g. Bielen et al 2016; Christensen and Szmer 2012).…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%