It has been argued that procedural formalism undermines economic efficiency by fostering rent-seeking and corruption. We challenge this view by arguing that a number of judicial procedures foster economic growth by increasing the predictability of court decisions, which leads to more...

It has been argued that procedural formalism undermines economic efficiency by fostering rent-seeking and corruption. We challenge this view by arguing that a number of judicial procedures foster economic growth by increasing the predict-ability of court decisions, which leads to more...

The Condorcet Jury Theorem is derived from the implicit assumption that jury members only commit one type of error. If the probability of this error is smaller than 0.5, then group decisions are better than those of individual members. In binary decision situations, however, two types of error...

Several countries practice a system where laymen, who lack legal education, participate in the judicial decision making. Yet, little is known about their potential influence on the court rulings. In Sweden lay judges (namndeman) are affiliated with the political parties and appointed in...

Well functioning judiciaries are key to economic development. Combining existing information with a newly collected dataset, the paper provides cross-country comparisons of measures of judicial performance, and investigates how cross-country differences in trial length are related to the...

Combining existing information with a newly collected dataset, the paper develops indicators of the performance and the institutional characteristics of OECD judicial systems. It provides cross-country comparisons of measures of trial length, accessibility to justice services and predictability...

We exploit a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on diversity of citizenship in legal disputes to estimate the contribution of the court system to firm value. In an event study, we find that an increase in state court quality from bottom to top tercile is associated with an average increase in equity...

We estimate the link between the court system and firm value by exploiting a U.S. Supreme Court ruling which changed firms' exposure to different courts. We find that exposure to courts which are highly ranked by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce increases firm value. The effect is driven by...

Rational politicians are interested in judicial independence (JI) in order to make their promises credible. But if politicians preferences deviate from the dicta of the judiciary, they also have incentives to renege on judicial independence. These two conflicting aspects are measured by two...

The authors provide a unique perspective on how the Court of Final Appeal has operated from 1997 to 2010. The study tracks the rising caseload in the Court, considers the statistical profile of the new system of judges and notes the greater attention being paid by the final court to public law cases