Judicial Independence, Judges’ Incentives and Efficiency

Alessandro Melcarne () and Giovanni Ramello ()

Review of Law & Economics, 2015, vol. 11, issue 2, 149-169

Abstract: Although often assumed by economic theory, the idea of an efficient judicial system often sounds like an oxymoron. In this work, we suggest an innovative approach to investigating the determinants of court performance. Our focus is on determining the ideal institutional environment for fostering the appropriate set of incentives for judges to operate efficiently. In this setting, we find evidence that greater independence enjoyed by the judiciary from politics induces more competition among judges to obtain professional upgrades. Such an environment will incentivize ambitious individuals to be more efficient, thus positively affecting the aggregate performance of the judiciary.

Keywords: judicial efficiency; judicial independence; judicial decision-making; DEA; clearance rate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C34 K41 K49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/rle-2015-0024 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Working Paper: Judicial Independence, Judges’ Incentives and Efficiency (2015)
Working Paper: Judicial Independence, Judges’ Incentives and Efficiency (2015)
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:bpj:rlecon:v:11:y:2015:i:2:p:149-169:n:7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/rle/html

DOI: 10.1515/rle-2015-0024

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Law & Economics is currently edited by Francesco Parisi

More articles in Review of Law & Economics from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().