Although an overwhelming proportion of all legal disputes end in settlement, the determinants of the timing of settlement remain empirically underexplored. We draw on a novel dataset on the duration of commercial disputes in Slovenia to study how the timing of settlement is shaped by the stages...

This paper examines the strategic effects of case preparation in litigation. Specifically, it shows how the pretrial efforts incurred by one party may alter its adversary's incentives to settle. We build a sequential game with one-sided asymmetric information where the informed party first...

This paper introduces the concept of emotions into the standard litigation contest. Positive (negative) emotions emerge when litigants win (lose) at trial and are dependent in particular on the level of defendant fault. Our findings establish that standard results of litigation contests change...

The implementation of European Union directives into national law is at the discretion of member states. We analyze incentives for member states to deviate from these directives when the European Commission may sue a defecting member state and rulings at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are...

Labor courts play an important role in determining the effective level of labor market regulation in Germany, but their application of law may not be even-handed. Based on a simple theoretical model and a new panel data set, we identify a nomination bias in labor court activity - that is, court...

Court delays are a frequent concern, yet what explains court case duration remains incompletely understood. We study the time to court case resolution by drawing on a detailed case-level dataset of civil suits filed at a major Belgian court. We utilize the competing risks regression framework to...

Despite the judiciary's central role in the capitalist market system, micro-level empirical analyses of courts in post-socialist countries are remarkably rare. This paper draws on a unique hand-collected dataset of commercial claims filed at Slovenian courts to examine the determinants of two...

I develop a stylized model of court procedures that resolve disputes concerning FRAND-encumbered standard essential patents (SEPs). I analyze the effects of injunctions and potential court-imposed FRAND rates on negotiated royalty rates. The SEP-holders' ability to hold-up is constrained by the...