Labor Courts, Nomination Bias, and Unemployment in Germany

Helge Berger () and Michael Neugart

No 1752, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Labor courts play an important role in determining the effective level of labor market regulation in Germany, but their application of law may not be even-handed. Based on a simple theoretical model and a new panel data set, we identify a nomination bias in labor court activity - that is, court activity varies systematically with the political leaning of the government that has appointed judges. In an extension, we find a significant positive relation between labor court activity and unemployment, even after controlling for the endogeneity of court activity. The results have potentially important policy implications regarding the independence of the judiciary and labor market reforms.

Keywords: courts; labor courts; law production; nomination bias; unemployment; regulation; firing costs; Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp1752.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Labor courts, nomination bias, and unemployment in Germany (2011)
Working Paper: Labor courts, nomination bias and unemployment in Germany (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_1752

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().