Determinants of Judicial Efficiency Change : Evidence from Brazil

Judicial efficiency matters for economic development. Nevertheless, the determinants of judicial productivity growth are not entirely understood. Using data of Brazil’s state courts for the period of 2009 to 2014, this paper analyses judicial productivity change and its possible determinants over time in a two stage approach. First, data envelopment analysis is used to calculate Malmquist productivity measures which are decomposed in: technical change (frontier-shift effect) and efficiency change which is composed of pure efficiency change (catch-up effect) and scale efficiency change (size effect). In the second stage, fixed effect models are estimated to evaluate the determinants of judicial productivity growth. The first stage results show a slight improvement in judicial productivity trend, which is defined mainly by efficiency change, since technical change deteriorated in the period. While the second stage findings suggest the inexistence of a trade-off between judicial quality and efficiency improvement, while judges remuneration, legal complexity and technology use affect judicial productivity, however not always in the expected direction