Does Exposure to Concurrent Cases Affect Judicial Decisions? Evidence from the Paris Labor Court

Claudine Desrieux (), Romain Espinosa () and Michael Visser ()
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Claudine Desrieux: CRED, University Paris Panthéon-Assas
Romain Espinosa: CIRED (CNRS) and CRED, University Paris Panthéon-Assas
Michael Visser: ENSAE-CREST and CRED, University Paris Panthéon-Assas

No 2024-09, Working Papers from Center for Research in Economics and Statistics

Abstract: Judges often handle multiple cases in a single court session, raising the question of whether their verdicts are interrelated. This paper examines if judicial outcomes are interrelated utilizing novel data from the Paris Labor Court, where judges concurrently determine the amounts employers must pay employees. Exploiting quasi-random assignment of cases and juries to sessions, we estimate simultaneous Tobit models following a recent method by Xu and Lee (2015) to account for the mass at zero of awarded amounts and the simultaneous nature of decisions. Controlling for characteristics of defendants and plaintiffs, case specifics, session features, and judge attributes, our analysis finds no evidence that compensation amounts awarded to plaintiffs are influenced by those awarded to others in the same session. These findings suggest that simultaneous decision-making may offer a more impartial approach to case handling compared to sequential processes, which prior literature suggests are prone to path dependency.

Keywords: Concurrent outcome exposure; Labor dispute; Simultaneous judicial decisions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J52 K31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2024-08-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
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