Rights and judicial independence

Yukihiro Yazaki ()

Economics of Governance, 2014, vol. 15, issue 2, 179-201

Abstract: This paper models endogenous judicial independence (JI) as a commitment device in a political commitment game between a ruler and citizens. In a situation where citizens can observe the effectiveness of JI with some positive probability, the model shows that the ruler in fact creates an independent judiciary and credibly commits to an announced tax rate, i.e., the ruler protects private property rights. Even when citizens have no chance to observe the effectiveness of JI, the ruler can still guarantee property rights by granting human rights as a signal of JI. Although the creation of JI achieves a Pareto improvement compared with its lack, two sources of inefficiency arise. First, the equilibrium tax is inefficiently high in the sense that the tax rate is on the inefficient side of the Laffer curve. This inefficiently high tax reflects the cost of credible commitment. Second, equilibrium JI for guaranteeing human rights is inefficiently high in the sense that the ruler does not entirely use JI for credibly committing to a low tax. This inefficiently high JI represents the cost of credible signalling. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Keywords: Judicial independence; Property rights; Human rights; Commitment; H2; K40; O10; P16; P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10101-014-0139-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:ecogov:v:15:y:2014:i:2:p:179-201

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10101/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10101-014-0139-4

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Governance is currently edited by Amihai Glazer and Marko Koethenbuerger

More articles in Economics of Governance from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().