LAW & ECONOMICS COLLOQUIUM
presents
Paige Marta Skiba
Vanderbilt University Law School
Shrouded in Turin:
Judicial Decision Making and Delay in Italian Small Claims Courts
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
4:10 – 5:45
Flavelle Building, Room 219
78 Queen’s Park
The Italian judicial system is notoriously slow, with an estimated backlog of 5 million cases. We use a sample of 903,660 court cases in Turin to study the role that various adjudication procedures play in judicial efficiency. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the procedures governing how judges rule in small claims and implement a quasi-experimental approach to estimate the causal effect of less restrictive procedures. For any claim valued below €1,100, judges do not need to provide formal legal justification for their decisions. Judges can rule based on “equity,” i.e., fairness or commonsense grounds. For cases valued above this equity threshold, judges do not have such flexibility. Our regression discontinuity estimates, which exploit the variation in these adjudication procedures just above and below this threshold, reveal that when judges are able to rule on the basis of their personal sentiment of justice, decisions are made nearly six months faster. We discuss the policy implications in the realm of small claims including methods to ease congestion in Italian courts and efforts to improve judicial efficiency more broadly.
Paige Marta Skiba has conducted innovative research in the area of behavioral law and economics and commercial law, particularly on topics related to her economics dissertation, Behavior in High-Interest Credit Markets. Her current research focuses on the causes and consequences of borrowing on high-interest credit, such as payday loans, auto-title loans, and pawnshops, as well as the regulation of these industries. She has been the recipient of numerous research grants and fellowships from institutions such as the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Institute on Aging, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance, and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. Professor Skiba earned her Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007. She teaches Bankruptcy and Behavioral Law and Economics to J.D. students. She also teaches Law and Economics, Behavioral Law and Economics, and Econometrics for the Legal Research in the Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
