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

•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.