Professional judges receive a fixed salary and are largely exempt from disciplinary sanctions. How can performance still be secured? Judges share a culture consisting of work-related norms and values, derive status from their standing within the professional community, and are susceptible to...

Controlling the performance of employed physicians, university professors, or tenured judges is a difficult managerial problem, because these professionals perform complex tasks that are hard to measure and because many of the economic incentives common to private-sector employees do not apply...

According to economic analysis, common-law courts resolve individual legal disputes and create new, judge-made law. In this article, I study both functions in a civil-law context by analyzing data for nine German labor courts of appeal (Landesarbeitsgerichte) in the period 1980-1996. Output of...