We utilize case-level data from a large Belgian court to study a policy-relevant but thus far empirically unexplored aspect of judicial behavior: the time that a judge takes to deliberate on a case before rendering a verdict. Exploiting the de facto random administrative assignment of filed...

Public authorities in many jurisdictions are concerned about the proliferation of illegal content and products on online platforms. In this paper, we provide an economic appraisal of platform liability that highlights the effects of a stricter liability rule on several key variables such as...

We study a platformâs incentives to delist IP-infringing products and the effects of holding the platform liable for the presence of such products on innovation and consumer welfare. For a given number of buyers, platform liability increases innovation by reducing the competitive pressure faced...

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...

We generate and analyze data pertinent to the role of caselaw in England's economic development during the Industrial Revolution. Applying topic modeling to a corpus of 67,455 reports on English court cases, we construct annual time series of caselaw developments between 1765 and 1865. We then...

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...

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...

Adding to the literature on the effects of government decentralization, this paper uses a large sample of individual responses from more than a hundred countries about public's perceptions of government's performance along various dimensions to study the relative influences of different types of...

Consider legal uncertainty as uncertainty about the legality of a specific action. In particular, suppose that the threshold of legality is uncertain. I show that this legal uncertainty raises welfare. Legal uncertainty changes deterrence in opposite directions. The probability of conviction...

In a world with risk-neutral agents, liability rules will only induce efficient behaviour if these rules impose the full (marginal) costs of an action on the parties. However, institutional restrictions or bilateral activity choices can prevent the full internalisation of costs. A mechanism is...