Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/144982 
Year of Publication: 
2016
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 5947
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
We utilize case-level data from a large Belgian court to study a policy-relevant but thus far empirically unexplored aspect of judicial behavior: the time that a judge takes to deliberate on a case before rendering a verdict. Exploiting the de facto random administrative assignment of filed cases among the serving judges and using survival analysis methods, we find that the duration of judicial deliberation varies not only with measures of case complexity, but also with judge and disputing party characteristics. We further find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that longer judicial deliberation improves the quality of judicial decisions.
Subjects: 
judicial deliberation
case-level data
survival analysis
speed-quality tradeoff
Belgium
JEL: 
K40
K41
K49
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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