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 Questo indirizzo email è protetto dagli spambots. È necessario abilitare JavaScript per vederlo.
PETER GRAJZL (Corresponding author)
Department of Economics, The Williams School, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA 24450, USA
and CESifo, Munich, Germany Questo indirizzo email è protetto dagli spambots. È necessario abilitare JavaScript per vederlo.
ATANAS SLAVOV
Department of Public Administration, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, 1000 Sofia, Bulgaria Questo indirizzo email è protetto dagli spambots. È necessario abilitare JavaScript per vederlo.
KATARINA ZAJC
Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia Questo indirizzo email è protetto dagli spambots. È necessario abilitare JavaScript per vederlo.
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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