Judicial productivity, delay and efficiency: A Directional Distance Function (DDF) approach

•Time as a key factor in the judicial system since it represents a negative externality.•The DDF is the most appropriate and most coherent methodology to measure judicial efficiency.•A bootstrap procedure is applied to the DDF.

The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it provides a contribution to the debate on judicial efficiency by conducting an applied research on the Italian tax judiciary thanks to a database covering the activities of the Italian tax courts over a 3-year period (2009–2011). On the other hand, it also contributes to the methodological debate, as it compares results obtained with Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Directional Distance Function (DDF), two related non-parametric techniques which allow evaluating the efficiency of each observation as the radial distance from the efficient frontier defined by the best observations. While DEA has already been used to assess the mere technical efficiency of judicial systems, the DDF offers a valuable additional contribution, since it makes it possible to minimize the social cost of production of adjudication in the measurement. This feature makes it particularly attractive in those sectors in which production externalities may arise, such as judicial delays in the case investigated here. Additionally, the paper first applies the bootstrap to the DDF procedure in order to provide more robust estimates and to compare them with the DEA results.