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...

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...

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...

While the tradeoff between market failure and government failure has been explored both theoretically and in practical policy design, the question of whether this trade-off appears in the calculus of citizens’ demands for government regulation remains underexplored. We first clarify the...

Since giving to religious organizations constitutes a substantial portion of total charitable giving, an understanding of the determinants of religious giving is a vital policy concern. Drawing on a novel congregation-level panel dataset, we examine whether religious giving is driven by...

The former socialist countries of South East and Central Europe exhibit great variation in institutional quality. Unlike the sparse existing literature, I claim that the variation can be explained by the legacies of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. I identify historical legacies of the Empires,...

This paper studies the ownership structures of unlisted privatized firms in Slovenia. On the basis of official ownership records for all nonfinancial firms over a six-year period (1999-2004), we explore the factors responsible for the concentration of ownership and for the dissolution of the...