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...

Insolvency systems play a crucial role in protection of creditor rights, yet micro-level empirical evidence on the functioning of insolvency regimes worldwide is sparse. We investigate whether creditors' recovery of outstanding claims, a measure of ex-post efficiency of an insolvency regime,...

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...

Although an overwhelming proportion of all legal disputes end in settlement, the determinants of the timing of settlement remain empirically underexplored. We draw on a novel dataset on the duration of commercial disputes in Slovenia to study how the timing of settlement is shaped by the stages...

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...

We contrast alternative liability rules for social control of product risks when heterogeneous consumers considering purchasing a durable good due to cognitive errors and biases mispredict future product benefits and, thus, the extent of future product usage. Since the expected consumer harm...

We use machine-learning methods to study the features and origins of the Baconian program, a cultural and methodological paradigm viewed as providing the intellectual roots for modern economic growth. After building a machine-readable corpus of Bacon's works, we estimate a structural topic...

Court delays are a frequent concern, yet what explains court case duration remains incompletely understood. We study the time to court case resolution by drawing on a detailed case-level dataset of civil suits filed at a major Belgian court. We utilize the competing risks regression framework to...

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...