کد مقاله | کد نشریه | سال انتشار | مقاله انگلیسی | نسخه تمام متن |
---|---|---|---|---|
5056253 | 1371620 | 2016 | 21 صفحه PDF | دانلود رایگان |
- Post-communist judiciaries lack effectiveness, yet research on them is scarce.
- We examine a new court-level panel dataset from Bulgaria.
- We find that court output is primarily driven by the demand for court services.
- The number of judges, a key court resource, matters only in a subset of courts.
- We do not find evidence of a quantity-quality tradeoff.
The lack of an 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 the 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.
Journal: Economic Systems - Volume 40, Issue 1, March 2016, Pages 18-38