ISSN 2385-2275 No. 7 - February 2015
Courts in a Transition Economy: Case Disposition and the Quantity-Quality Tradeoff in Bulgaria
VALENTINA DIMITROVA-GRAJZL
Department of Economics and Business, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, VA 24450, USA This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
PETER GRAJZL (Corresponding author)
Department of Economics, The Williams School, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA 24450, USA
and CESifo, Munich, Germany This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
ATANAS SLAVOV
Department of Public Administration, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, 1000 Sofia, Bulgaria This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
KATARINA ZAJC
Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Abstract:
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 Bulgaria to study the determinants of court case disposition and to evaluate whether judicial decision-making is subject to a quantity-quality tradeoff.
Addressing endogeneity concerns, we find that case disposition in Bulgarian courts is largely driven by demand for court services. The number of serving judges, a key court resource, matters to a limited extent
only in a subsample of courts, a result suggesting that judges adjust their productivity based on the number of judges serving at a court. We do not find evidence implying that increasing court productivity would
decrease adjudicatory quality. We discuss the policy implications of our findings.
JEL classification: P37, K40, D02
Keywords: courts, post-socialist countries, case disposition, quantity-quality tradeoff
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