Fewer courts, less justice? Evidence from the 2008 French reform of labor courts

Romain Espinosa, Claudine Desrieux () and Hengrui Wan
Additional contact information
Claudine Desrieux: CRED - Centre de Recherche en Economie et Droit - UP2 - Université Panthéon-Assas
Hengrui Wan: ENSAE Paris - École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The need to provide a high-quality justice at reasonable cost represents a current challenge for many public authorities. Many reform projects propose to remove some courts in order to rationalize the judiciary. This paper explores the 2008 French reform of labor courts (removing 20% of the courts) to empirically investigate the determinants of the removal decision, and its consequences on caseload and case duration in the remaining courts. This represents -to our knowledge- the first attempt to evaluate the impacts of courts' removal. Using panel data, our empirical strategy is based on probit estimations, counterfactuals, as well as 3SLS estimations. Our results show that the reform targeted small and concentrated courts. At the aggregated national level, it appears that duration did not increase, but the demand for litigation decreased. Locally, we find that courts were affected in different ways according to the relative burden they took on.

Keywords: courts’ removal; judiciary reform; caseload; judicial map; case duration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01634211v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published in European Journal of Law and Economics, 2017, 43 (2), pp.195-237. ⟨10.1007/s10657-015-9507-y⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01634211v1/document (application/pdf)

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:hal:journl:halshs-01634211

DOI: 10.1007/s10657-015-9507-y

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().