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Determinants of in-court settlements: empirical evidence from a German trial court

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2018

MICHAEL BERLEMANN  and
ROBIN CHRISTMANN
MICHAEL BERLEMANN*
Affiliation:
Helmut-Schmidt University, Hamburg, Germany
ROBIN CHRISTMANN*
Affiliation:
Leibniz School of Business, Hanover, Germany
*
*Email: [email protected]
**Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Because verdicts are typically the more costly resolution of legal disputes, most governments are interested in high settlement rates. In this paper, we use a unique dataset of 860 case records from a German trial court to explore which institutional factors have a significant impact on the decision to settle in civil law litigation. We find that procedural aspects and individual characteristics of the involved judge have a significant impact on in-court settlement probability. We also find that judge-specific aspects such as the judge's gender may have an impact on settlement probabilities in certain subfields of law. Based on our empirical results, we derive some conclusions for legal policies that aim at increasing settlement rates.

Type
Symposium on the Empirics of Judicial Institutions
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , February 2019 , pp. 143 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2018 

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