Organized legal professions are typically viewed by economists as rent-seeking interest groups. Starting from the observation that the legal professions have been central in institutional development in countries with the highest quality institutions, we add a different perspective, developing a...

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...

We contribute to the scant empirical literature on court activity by examining how judicial staffing and caseload influence court output in Slovenia, a post-socialist EU member state struggling with implementing an effective judicial system. Unlike the majority of the existing literature, we...

The lack of effective judiciary in post-socialist countries has been a pervasive concern and successful judicial reform an elusive goal. Yet to date, little empirical research exists on the functioning of courts in the post-socialist world. We draw on a new court-level panel dataset from...

We study the desirability of interventionist harmonization of legal standards across multiple, mutually interdependent jurisdictions which strive to adapt law to their local conditions as well as to synchronize it with other jurisdictions. In a setting where jurisdictions are privately informed...

We contribute to the scant empirical literature on the functioning of courts in the post-socialist world by analyzing civil case disposition in Slovenia. We first characterize basic empirical patterns in modes of civil case disposition in Slovenian local courts. We then examine court-level...

We study the desirability of interventionist harmonization of legal standards across multiple, mutually interdependent jurisdictions which strive to adapt law to their local conditions as well as to synchronize it with other jurisdictions. In a setting where jurisdictions are privately informed...

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...

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...