This paper assesses the widely held belief that damages for pain and suffering are random or arbitrary. We empirically analyze the differential impact of a plaintiff's personal characteristics, pain-specific circumstances and a lawsuit's procedural features on such payments. Relying on a dataset...

There is extensive literature on whether courts or legislators produce efficient rules, but which of them produces rules efficiently? The law is subject to uncertainty ex ante; uncertainty makes the outcomes of trials difficult to predict and deters parties from settling disputes out of court. In...

The 2015 Civil Code of Procedure (Law 13.105) entailed extensive changes in the system of civil appeals in Brazil but, after more than seven years of its enactment, there hasn't been any empirical assessment regarding the impacts of the procedural reform on the propensity to appeal in civil...

This paper used individual level data in Japan to explore how a complainant’s past trial experience influences their satisfaction and incentive to bring a future lawsuit. Controlling for kinds of incidents and a complainant’s individual characteristics, the major findings were; (1) there is a...

We examine the relationship between scientific knowledge and the legal system with a focus on the exclusion of expert testimony from trial as ruled by the Daubert standard in the US. We introduce a simple framework to understand and assess the role of judges as 'gatekeepers', monitoring the...

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...

This paper assesses the widely held belief that damages for pain and suffering are random or arbitrary. We empirically analyze the differential impact of a plaintiff's personal characteristics, pain-specific circumstances and a lawsuit's procedural features on such payments. Relying on a dataset...

There is extensive literature on whether courts or legislators produce efficient rules, but which of them produces rules efficiently? The law is subject to uncertainty ex ante; uncertainty makes the outcomes of trials difficult to predict and deters parties from settling disputes out of court. 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...