We study the long-term and dynamic relationship between de jure and de facto judicial independence using a large panel dataset covering 50 countries over a period of 50 years. Our analysis shows a negative relationship between these variables, a sharp cont rast to the prevailing theoretical view...

We argue that membership in International Organizations (IOs) is an important determinant of FDI inflows. To the extent that membership restricts a country from pursuing policies that are harmful to investors, it can signal low political risk. Using data over the 1971-2005 period, we find that...

Over 10 years ago, Feld and Voigt (2003) introduced the first indicator for objectively measuring the actual independence of the judiciary and demonstrated its utility in a large cross-section of countries. The indicator has been widely used, but also criticized. This paper presents more recent...

This paper is based on the conjecture that institutional details matter and that attempts to estimate the economic effects of federalism by drawing on a simple dummy variable neglect potentially important institutional details. Based on a principal component analysis, seven aspects of both...

Legal philosophers like Montesquieu, Hegel and Tocqueville have argued that lay participation in judicial decision-making would have benefits reaching far beyond the realm of the legal system narrowly understood. From an economic point of view, lay participation in judicial decision-making can...

Persson and Tabellini (2003) show that presidential regimes and majoritarian election systems have important effects on fiscal policy, government effectiveness and productivity. Here, their dataset is extended in a number of ways: the number of countries included is increased from 85 to up to...

This paper shows that courts are not only a crucial part of the rule of law in the conventional sense but that they can also serve an important function in revealing information regarding the performance of lower level governments to the central government, and thereby improve their performance....

Based on data from the EU Justice Scoreboard, we identify a puzzle: National levels of judicial independence (as perceived by the citizens of EU member states) are negatively associated with the presence of formal legislation usually considered as conducive to judicial independence. We try to...