Judges and court productivity: evidence from Spanish labour courts

Abstract The aim of this paper is to test whether the courts’ productivity, proxied by the “Resolution Rate”, is affected by the acting of other judges, beside the incumbent one, ruling in the court as substitute judges. It also seeks to study if this effect depends on whether the additional judges are professionals or not. From a methodological point of view, the treatment variable is defined as a dummy that takes the value of 1 if the court is shared with other judges. To analyse the impact of this variable on court productivity, least squares, panel data estimations and dose–response models are applied. The data was obtained from the annual judicial statistics published by the Spanish General Council of the Judiciary with information from all the Spanish Social Courts from 2005 to 2019. This database was modified in several ways to make the analysis robust and to eliminate possible sources of endogeneity. The main results show a reduction in productivity when other non-professional judges were working in the court, besides the incumbent one. However, no significant differences were detected if these additional judges were professional.