Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/110800 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 5283
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
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.
Subjects: 
courts
post-socialist countries
case disposition
quantity-quality tradeoff
JEL: 
P37
K40
D02
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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