Court structure and legal efficiency, the case of French échevinage in bankruptcy courts

Stéphane Esquerré ()
Additional contact information
Stéphane Esquerré: LARGE - Laboratoire de recherche en gestion et économie - UNISTRA - Université de Strasbourg - L'europe en mutation : histoire, droit, économie et identités culturelles - UNISTRA - Université de Strasbourg - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This paper investigates how the Court's organisation affect judgments. We use a historical accident to derive this impact. Indeed, though the same bankruptcy laws apply on the whole territory, courts in the eastern part of France (in Alsace-Moselle) consist on a mix of professional and non-professional judges, while other French Courts are only composed of lay judges. Using an original dataset of firms with monthly bankruptcy ratings, we analyse the decision to file for bankruptcy. To do so we restrict our sample to firms inside and outside but close to Alsace-Moselle. We study their survival after their rating has dropped between two months. We find mixed Courts in Alsace-Moselle have lower rates of bankruptcy which should be explained by a lower reorganisation rate. We could think that mixed courts are less efficient ex-ante compared to lay courts. Yet both have overall similar level of liquidation rate. Thus, both systems provide similar ex-post efficiency while behaving differently.

Date: 2019-10-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-02305492v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-02305492v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:hal:wpaper:hal-02305492

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().