Governance of tax courts

Roberto Ippoliti and Giovanni Ramello ()

Economics of Governance, 2018, vol. 19, issue 4, No 2, 317-338

Abstract: Abstract This paper attempts to penetrate the “black box” of the judiciary through an empirical investigation of the Italian tax courts of first instance. Both judicial delay and two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis approach with bootstrap are used to measure the efficiency of the court system and to further identify the main determinants of efficiency which, in line with the previous literature, seem to be mostly related to the judges’ effort. The study also takes advantage of an idiosyncratic feature of this branch of the Italian judiciary—in which judges are temporarily appointed and can continue to practice an external (though not conflicting) profession—to assess the impact of opportunity costs on the behavior of judges. The overall outcome confirms that judges maximize utility “the same as everybody else does” (Posner, Supreme Court Econ Rev 3:1–41, 1993).

Keywords: Judicial efficiency; Judges incentives; Data Envelopment Analysis; Tax justice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C44 J45 K41 M11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10101-018-0212-5

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