Small claims litigation in Italy
Paolo Fantini (paolo.fantini@giustizia.it),
Silvia Giacomelli,
Giuliana Palumbo (giuliana.palumbo@bancaditalia.it) and
Gianluca Volpe (gianluca.volpe@giustizia.it)
Additional contact information
Paolo Fantini: Ministry of Justice, General Directorate of Statistics
Giuliana Palumbo: Bank of Italy, Economics, research and international relations
Gianluca Volpe: Ministry of Justice, General Directorate of Statistics
No 92, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area
Abstract:
Despite accounting for a significant fraction of total litigation in Italy, small claims litigation has so far received little attention. Using a Ministry of Justice database that contains information disaggregated by subject matter, the paper provides a thorough description of the time trend and geographical distribution of small claims litigation in Italy in the period 2001-2008. Further, it empirically evaluates the impact of different socio-economic variables on litigation. We find evidence of a strong increase in appeals against administrative sanctions, while the number of civil proceedings remained stable. Litigation rates are higher in the Centre and Southern regions. More interestingly, for claims on movables and claims for damages caused by circulation of vehicles, they are strongly concentrated in some provinces. Our results provide support to existing anecdotal evidence about opportunistic behaviour in the use of courts.
Keywords: small claims; litigation; opportunistic behaviour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K0 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2011-0092/QEF_92.pdf (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:bdi:opques:qef_92_11
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (angela.barbaro@bancaditalia.it).