Impacts on efficiency of merging the Swedish district courts

Abstract

Judicial courts form a stringent example of public services using partially sticky inputs and outputs with heterogeneous quality. Notwithstanding, governments internationally are striving to improve the efficiency of and diminish the budget spent on court systems. Frontier methods such as data envelopment analysis are sometimes used in investigations of structural changes in the form of mergers. This essay reviews the methods used to evaluate the ex post efficiency of horizontal mergers. Identification of impacts is difficult. Therefore, three analytical frameworks are applied: (1) a technical efficiency comparison over time, (2) a metafrontier approach among mergers and non-mergers, and (3) a conditional differencein-differences approach where non-merged twins of the actual mergers are identified by matching. In addition, both time heterogeneity and sources of efficiency change are examined ex post. The method is applied to evaluate the impact on efficiency of merging the Swedish district courts from 95 to 48 between 2000 and 2009. Whereas the stated ambition for the mergers was to improve efficiency, no structured ex post analysis has been done. Swedish courts are shown to improve efficiency from merging. In addition to the particular application, this work may inform a more general discussion on public service efficiency measurement under structural changes, and their limits and potential.

The Impact of Institutional Performance on Payment Dynamics: Evidence From the Italian Manufacturing Industry

“…The current literature suggests that judicial efficiency has a positive impact on economic growth (Chemin, 2009), influencing both firm dynamics (e.g., Johnson et al, 2002;Dougherty, 2014;Lichand & Soares, 2014;Falavigna et al, 2019) and the financial markets (e.g., Djankov et al, 2008;Qian & Strahan, 2007;Ponticelli & Alencar, 2016). Consequently, there is a great need to improve the supply of justice, by correctly assessing the performance of the courts and of the judicial system as a whole (e.g., Silva, 2018;Mattsson & Tidanå, 2019;Agrell et al, 2020;Ippoliti & Tria, 2020).…”

Evaluating horizontal mergers in Swedish district courts using plant capacity concepts

“…We now illustrate the introduced PCU measures on an unbalanced sample of Swedish district courts used in Agrell, Mattsson, and Månsson (2020) and Mattsson and Tidanå (2019) 1 . From the initial data set containing yearly data related to 102 courts in the period 2000-2017, all available records are selected: this results in 1836 observations.…”

“…Following Agrell, Mattsson, and Månsson (2020) and Mattsson and Tidanå (2019), the production of Swedish district courts is specified as generating three outputs ((i) criminal cases, (ii) civil cases, and (iii) petitionary matters) from four inputs ((i) judges, (ii) law clerks, (iii) other personnel, and (iv) court area). Agrell, Mattsson, and Månsson (2020, p. 662) discuss how these three output categories are generated using an aggregation procedure for self-reported time consumption starting with fourteen output categories.…”

“…Second, Agrell, Mattsson, and Månsson (2020) employ a nonparametric frontier method to measure the ex post efficiency of horizontal mergers for the Swedish district courts, showing that the merged courts are more efficient than the non-merged ones. Moreover, Chen, Kerstens, and Zhu (2021) are the first to combine traditional convex (C) with nonconvex (NC) nonparametric frontier methods to calculate efficiency before and after the Swedish district courts mergers, suggesting that mergers improve efficiency mainly via scale efficiency under NC, but technical efficiency under C. In addition, under C most observations are sub-ject to decreasing returns to scale, while under NC one could have selected among increasing returns to scale observations for the mergers.…”

‘Cyclic syndrome’ of arrears and efficiency of Indian judiciary

“…Additionally, employing SFA, Antonucci et al ( 2014 ) showed that the efficiency of courts in Italy depends upon the vacancies and per capita expenditure. Moreover, considering the legislative reforms, a study in the context of Sweden by Agrell et al ( 2020 ) provided evidence of how merging the district courts, on average, made the whole sector more efficient. The impact of judiciary on the firm in Indian context was probed by Chakraborty ( 2016 ) which reported how the judicial quality is a significant factor in determining firm’s performance (especially for contract-intensive) both international and domestic.…”