Disputes on the penalties enforceable for breach of contract are often solved in court. Using a large dataset on Italian public procurement contracts, we study the effects of the inefficiency of the local law courts on the delay with which contractors deliver public works. First we sketch a...

La geografia giudiziaria Italiana, rimasta sostanzialmente invariata dai tempi dell’Unità d’Italia, ha subito una radicale trasformazione con la riforma contenuta nella Legge n. 148 del 2011 e nei relativi decreti attuativi n. 155 e 156 del 2012. Nel dettaglio, il Decreto Legislativo n. 155...

This article provides a critical overview on the interaction between private antitrust enforcement and commitment decisions. Over the last few years there has been a significant use of commitment decisions, especially in Italy, to solve competition concerns in numerous cases, with the sole...

The paper estimates the effects of a simpler criminal procedure on case durations and the probabilities that the defendant is charged and convicted. The identification strategy exploits a policy reform in the Czech Republic as a quasi-natural experiment. The reform allowed petty offenses to be...

There is empirical evidence of a cross-country positive association between the number of lawyers per capita and the extent of litigation. For instance, Spain has more litigation and more lawyers per capita than most OECD countries. How should this association be interpreted? In this paper we...

This paper analyzes trial by poison ingestion, or “sassywood,” as an institution of criminal justice in contemporary Liberia. We argue that effective criminal justice institutions must satisfy three conditions: they must be accessible to citizens, incentivize judicial administrators to...

We study the determinants of patent suits and their outcomes over the period 1978- 1999 by linking detailed information from the U.S. patent office, the federal court system, and industry sources. The probability of being involved in a suit is heterogeneous, being much higher for valuable...

After a summmary of the theoretical background of their research, the authors report two cases: two families of former agricultural workers in the region of Bordeaux, confronted with the French principle of “obligation alimentaire” [family support duty] towards the elderly : two old ladies,...