innovations in investment climate reforms: an impact evaluation workshop November 12-16, 2012, Paris The Speed of Justice Dakar Regional Court, Senegal Florence Kondylis Mattea Stein Impact Evaluation Concept Note

background Assumption: The speed of justice affects demand for legal resolution of business disputes the business climate Problem: No evidence on how to increase speed of justice No direct evidence on what this impact is at the firm level The Reform Unit of the MoJ in Senegal is working with DIME to get answers

intervention summary Treatment Delay Reminders Increase salience of information on treatment delays for the various actors > identified bottlenecks o President of chambers o Pre-trial Judges o Clerks (greffiers)  Increase treatment speed  Measure impact of variation in speed at the firm level  Does it work at scale (when all cases are subject to reminder pop-ups?)  Test on larger set of cases (Commercial and Civil) using regression discontinuity design (RDD)  speed of treatment just before / just after using high-frequency data

evaluation questions: the delays (1) Can a simple personnel economics intervention increase the speed of justice? Why? o Procrastination: the tool brings salience to a judge’s backlog >> he can manage his work better o Perception of increased scrutiny: judges become aware that bribe- seeking behavior might be monitored – e.g. sitting longer on cases with higher disputes How to tell them apart? o Testing impact of paper-based version of the same intervention would be the “ideal” test. Not feasible: too few judges o Instead, we use two things: – order of treatment of cases vs. size of the dispute » compare treatment and control – end of pilot (scale up): track speed and order of treatment to identify bottlenecks

evaluation questions: the delays (2) impact on quality of the decisions track the amount of cases going to appeal after the first instance decision is taken o proxy for parties’ satisfaction with the decision use survey questions to get at perceived quality of the justice process o stratify by winning / losing sides …!

evaluation questions: the firm Can a decrease in treatment delays have an impact at the firm level? Survival of the firm Decision to invest, employ, expand Access to banking services, credit etc. Perception of justice system and demand for legal resolution of business disputes o through series of hypothetical situations / disputes What is the potential for this type of interventions to improve the business climate? can a marginal change really have an impact?

evaluation design Unit of intervention: Court case (Total: 1,800) Random assignment at the level of the case: 900 treated: appear in pop-up windows 900 control: do not appear in any pop-up windows Court actors received pop-ups: All president of chambers (manage judges) All pre-trial judges All clerks o Only cases they are in charge of appear in their pop-ups

Pop-Up Chambre President 1/2

Pop-Up Chambre President 2/2

Pop-Up Clerk 1/2

Pop-Up Clerk 2/2

Pop-Up Pre-trial Judge 1/2

Pop-Up Pre-trial Judge 2/2

Sampling and Data Court-level data: Administrative data collected directly through the court software (all agents enter the various treatment steps into an interface) o Date of entry and dates of various steps entered >> compute duration and speed o Identify firms for tracking in the firm-level survey Firm-level data: track all firms involved in cases 2 planned rounds of survey collection o One 6 months after intervention (Summer 2013) o One 1 year later (Summer 2014) Issue of censoring: not all cases will be completed over the period of the trial >> use duration models

Thank you!