 How has the Covid19 pandemic impacted the courts of law? Evidence from BrazilCaio Castelliano, Peter Grajzl and Eduardo Watanabe International Review of Law and Economics, 2021, vol. 66, issue C Abstract: We provide empirical insight into the consequences of the Covid19 pandemic for the administration of justice. Drawing on a comprehensive monthly panel of Brazilian labor courts and using a difference-in-difference approach, we show that the pandemic has had a large and persistent deleterious effect on adjudicatory efficacy, leading to a massive decrease in the clearance rate and an increase in court backlogs. The pandemic has affected how courts dispose adjudication cases, expectedly causing a plummeting in the share of disputes resolved via trial hearings and, less predictably, exerting a temporally non-linear effect on the share of in-court settlements. Notably, we find no evidence of an effect of the pandemic on efficacy in enforcement. Although the pandemic led to an increase in the share of new filings requiring enforcement, any effect on the relative use of enforcement to execute court-ordered payments has been intermittent and temporary. The intensity of the pandemic has been an important moderating factor. Keywords: Covid19; Courts; Brazil; Labor justice; Adjudication; Enforcement (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:irlaec:v:66:y:2021:i:c:s0144818821000132 DOI: 10.1016/j.irle.2021.105989 Access Statistics for this article International Review of Law and Economics is currently edited by C. Ott, A. W. Katz and H-B. Schäfer More articles in International Review of Law and Economics from Elsevier |
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