How can institutional rupture be identified in settings where the treated unit is singular, interventions are composite, and institutional deterioration unfolds through mutually reinforcing constitutional, political, and legal transformations? We develop a counterfactual framework for identifying systemic judicial rupture in single-unit settings using synthetic-control methods, generalized synthetic controls, synthetic difference-in-differences, matrix completion, placebo inference, and latent institutional measurement. We apply the framework to Venezuela following the 1999 constitutional overhaul under Hugo Chávez. Across nine dimensions of judicial integrity, we document a large, persistent, and system-wide post-1999 divergence relative to multiple counterfactual constructions, including regional and worldwide donor pools. To address concerns regarding outcome proliferation and measurement instability, we construct a latent judicial quality index using principal-components analysis and show that the estimated rupture remains exceptionally strong across all specifications. The article contributes a general empirical framework for studying institutional collapse, constitutional backsliding, and judicial capture in environments where traditional panel approaches are poorly suited to the object of inference.

The appropriate method for determining the judicial interest rate remains unsettled. This article contributes to the debate by presenting a model that accounts for the complexities of party incentives and strategic delays in litigation. Additionally, we provide a rational explanation for the widespread use of a party-independent interest rate in many jurisdictions. When a single judicial interest rate is applied uniformly to all litigants, the optimal rate for minimizing delays can be understood as the average market interest rate, provided that the discount rates of plaintiffs and defendants are independently and identically distributed according to a symmetric distribution.

Why do voters reject constitutional proposals drafted by conventions they themselves elected? We study a two-stage constitutional process in which voters first elect a legislator to draft a new constitution and subsequently approve or reject it in a referendum. The model highlights how imperfect electoral signals generate asymmetric information between voters and legislators. Its principal novelty lies in reversing the conventional direction of asymmetric information—placing uncertainty on the side of legislators rather than voters. We show that informational distortions are most severe at intermediate levels of voter polarization: when polarization is high, electoral separation allows legislators to infer voter preferences accurately, whereas moderate polarization increases misinterpretation and rejection risk. Moreover, learning from noisy electoral signals can backfire. Legislators who rationally update their beliefs may be less likely to secure approval than those who strategically ignore electoral information. Surprisingly, referenda may fail to improve voter welfare even when all actors prefer reform. These findings offer a new perspective on recent constitutional failures by emphasizing interactions between polarization, information, and strategic learning.

This paper develops an economic analysis of the application of the law of restitution to the case of void contracts, when agreements may be unenforceable due to legal invalidity. It develops a simple model in which contracting parties' agreements potentially impose external harms. The analysis focuses on how alternative restitution regimes affect contracting incentives when there is a possibility that agreements may turn out to be unenforceable. A central insight is that in a setting in which contract invalidity is possible, contracting requires not merely that the parties' joint surplus is positive but also that a participation constraint is satisfied for each party (as there are states of the world in which the parties cannot redistribute the surplus between themselves). We show that full restitution can induce socially excessive contracting, while the denial of restitution can inefficiently deter welfare-enhancing transactions. A regime of partial restitution can potentially implement first-best outcomes by calibrating parties' incentives to the probability and magnitude of potential external harms. In essence, this regime can serve as a substitute for a Pigovian tax on the contracting parties. The paper discusses applications of this framework to the interest rate swap cases of the 1990s and to other contexts.

Judicial transformation may result either from shifts in institutional context (prompting behavioral adjustment among incumbent judges) or changes in the composition of the bench (particularly through court-packing strategies that introduce new appointees). This article examines the case of the Polish Constitutional Court to evaluate which of these mechanisms better accounts for the controversial transformation of the court since late 2015. Drawing on data from constitutional abstract review decisions spanning 2003 to 2023, we analyze the behavior of distinct cohorts of judges. Our findings reveal a marked alignment with government positions following the October 2015 parliamentary elections, especially among judges appointed by the newly elected ruling party. The evidence suggests that the transformation is driven primarily by changes in judicial composition rather than by behavioral adaptation among pre-existing judges.

This paper presents a formal model explaining how different legal rules governing compensation for non-convicted pretrial detainees impact the decisions of enforcers and courts when detaining and convicting individuals suspected of having committed a crime. The model shows that compensating every non-convicted pretrial detainee leads to too many convictions by increasing the cost of acquittals. It could also induce enforcers to apply pretrial detention more often than they should. Still, not compensating acquitted pretrial detainees avoids these two strategic effects but undermines other goals such as crime deterrence. By contrast, providing compensation only to those acquitted pretrial detainees whose innocence is more likely than their guilt prevents enforcers and courts from detaining and convicting too many defendants.

This paper examines whether major political institutional disruptions produce temporary shocks or structural breaks in long-term development. Using the 1979 Iranian Revolution as a natural experiment, we apply the synthetic control method to estimate its causal effect on economic growth and institutional quality. Drawing on a panel of 66 countries from 1950 to 2015, we construct counterfactual trajectories for Iran in the absence of revolutionary change. Our results show a persistent and statistically significant divergence in per capita GDP, institutional quality, and legal constraints on executive power. We perform in-space and in-time placebo tests to rule out confounding events, such as the Iran-Iraq War and international sanctions, and propose confidence interval estimation to address uncertainty in treatment effects. The findings identify the Iranian Revolution as a structural institutional rupture, with implications for the classification of institutional change more broadly. We contribute a generalizable empirical framework for distinguishing between temporary and structural institutional shocks in long-run development.

We study the value of foreign judges and foreign case citations for emerging courts in postcolonial democracies, with a specific focus on the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeals (HKCFA). The HKCFA, Hong Kong’s highest appellate court since the transfer of its sovereignty to China, features foreign judges as full members of the court. Using a novel dataset of all publicly available HKCFA decisions from 1997 to 2020, we show that there is a significantly higher number of foreign case citations in cases where foreign judges have participated. Further analyses show that this correlation is stronger where the Hong Kong government is a disputing party, and more specifically, where the court rules in favor of the Hong Kong government. The findings are consistent with the possibility that foreign judges’ expertise in foreign case law is relevant for upholding the perception of the court’s independence from the executive branch. This explanation is in line with existing theories on the role of foreign judges on domestic courts.

This article examines the long-run relationship between constitutional monarchy and economic growth using a panel of 37 countries from 1870 to 2018. Exploiting the staggered timing of regime transitions as a source of quasi-experimental variation, we reassess whether monarchies promote prosperity or merely survive because of it. The results suggest that pre-existing economic development, rather than monarchical institutions themselves, explains the persistence of constitutional monarchy. The apparent growth advantage of monarchies is concentrated among wealthier pre-war states, where fiscal capacity and institutional maturity sustained stability. In poorer settings, constitutional monarchies failed to generate lasting growth and were eventually replaced by republican regimes, which subsequently outperformed them. These findings imply that prosperity sustains monarchy, not the reverse, and that contemporary constitutional monarchies represent the historical survivors of economic success rather than its institutional cause.

The synthetic control method has emerged as a widely utilized empirical tool for estimating the causal effects of public policies, natural disasters, and other interventions on various economic, social, institutional, and political outcomes. In this study, we demonstrate the potential application of this method in empirical comparative law by estimating the impact of the 2010 constitutional referendum in Turkiye on the trajectory of judicial independence. By comparing Turkiye with a salient Mediterranean donor pool of countries that did not experience similar interventions during the period from 1987 to 2021, we provide evidence of a severe breakdown and erosion of judicial independence. This deterioration appears to be a direct response to the populist constitutional backsliding initiated by the government-orchestrated assault on the judiciary, which was carried out under the guise of judicial modernization in 2010, before the additional constitutional reforms in 2017.

We investigate how government-orchestrated assaults on the judiciary, disguised as modernization efforts, undermine judicial independence. Our study focuses on Venezuela's constitutional overhaul in the early 2000s, initiated by Hugo Chávez and implemented through a judicial emergency committee. We employ a hybrid synthetic control and difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impact of populist attacks on judicial independence trajectories. By comparing Venezuela to a stable pool of countries without radical constitutional changes, our identification strategy isolates the effect of populist assaults from unobservable confounders and common time trends. Our findings reveal that authoritarian interventions lead to an immediate and lasting breakdown of judicial independence. The deterioration in judicial independence vis-á-vis the estimated counterfactual is robust to variations in the donor pool composition. It does not appear to be driven by pre-existing judicial changes and withstands numerous temporal and spatial placebo checks across over nine million randomly sequenced donor samples.

This study investigates the long-term impact of socialism on economic growth, focusing on the unique case of labor-managed socialism in former Yugoslavia. By comparing Slovenia with OECD and East Asian donor countries that did not undergo postwar socialist transitions, we estimate counterfactual scenarios using synthetic control methods. Our findings show that labor-managed socialism led to a temporary growth deviation, followed by a structural collapse in the 1980s. Our estimates suggest that Slovenia’s per capita GDP would be 22 percent higher today had there been postwar economic and political liberalization in place. By contrast, if socialist policies had continued after 1990, Slovenia's per capita GDP would be 63 percent lower today. These results remain robust across various robustness checks.

This study examines how public support for due process in corruption investigations is affected by partisan biases. Using a survey experiment conducted with a representative sample of Portuguese voters, it finds that voters' support for legally enshrined due process rights is conditional on their partisan alignment with the corruption suspects. Specifically, respondents exhibit greater support for due process protections for in‐party than for out‐party suspects, with out‐party derogation prevailing. By focusing on public attitudes towards legal fairness and horizontal accountability, these results expand our understanding of the role of partisan loyalties in accountability for corruption beyond their better‐known role in electoral processes.

Can governments make courts politically compliant without undermining public confidence in the judicial system? Many studies show a positive relationship between judicial independence and citizens' trust in courts. However, most of them have shown static cross-sectional correlations rather than actual effects of court curbing on trust. Factors such as citizens' level of education and political preferences may also play a role in moderating reactions to court curbing. We analyse how assaults on judicial independence by populist governments in Turkey, Hungary, and Poland affected judicial trust, using a difference-in-differences approach to Eurobarometer data. While we find evidence that court curbing has an adverse effect on judicial trust, this effect is much clearer among citizens who are ideologically distant from their governments. These findings coincide with experimental evidence indicating how citizens tolerate democratic backsliding, suggesting that, for many, trust in the judicial system can subsist even when courts are made politically subservient.

This article summarizes the main results of the independent and interdisciplinary scientific research project (in process) – legal and empirical – for which the object is to measure and evaluate tax judicial activity in Portugal. It will also analyse the results obtained through the selected indicators and express them in graphs that serve to point out the issues that merit the legal and public policy reflection. The first results were published in September 2022 in four reports, specifically: I. Results on Tax Litigation at the Supreme Administrative Court (STA) – judgments published in 2018 and 2019; II. Results on Tax Litigation at the STA – judgments published in 2018 and 2019 (value of litigation exceeding EUR 100,000); III. Results on Tax Litigation at the Administrative Arbitration Center (CAAD) – arbitration decisions published from 2016 to 2021 (value of the dispute above EUR 100,000); IV. Results on Tax Litigation at CAAD – arbitration decisions published from 2018 and 2019. Complementary results were published in February 2023: V. Results on Tax Litigation at CAAD – arbitration decisions published from 2016 to 2021 (other analyses and results available); and VI. Mass Proceedings – Complementary Report on the Results of Tax Litigation at CAAD (arbitration awards published until 31 December 2022). The analyses in this article essentially refer to the results obtained in tax arbitration.

The law of restitution and unjust enrichment has emerged as an important and independent branch of private law globally but has attracted relatively little economic analysis. This article develops a model of the core example of restitution—mistaken payments—in a parsimonious setting with two pairs of buyers and sellers and low (high) transaction costs within (across) pairs. The framework is based on the idea that mistaken payments to strangers impose a transaction tax on contracting parties. We show that full (partial) restitution is socially optimal when harm is unilateral (bilateral). The model generates several novel insights, shedding new light on the rationale for partial restitution, distortions generated by the change-of-position defense, and the discharge-for-value doctrine (implicated in the recent widely discussed case involving a large mistaken payment by Citibank). Taking account of moral obligations complicates the economic analysis but does not undermine the main results.