1. Global Workshop on Development Impact Evaluation in Finance and Private Sector Rio de Janeiro, June 6-10, 2011 The Speed of Justice Dakar Regional Court, Senegal Florence Kondylis Mamadou Lo Mandiogou Ndiaye Mattea Stein Souleymane Teliko Impact Evaluation Concept Note

2. 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

3. Intervention Summary  Treatment Delay Reminders  Increase salience of information on treatment delays for the various actors > identified bottlenecks ▪ President of chambers ▪ Pre-trial Judges ▪ 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)

4. Evaluation Questions  Can a simple personnel economics intervention increase the speed of justice?  Why? [Perception of increased scrutiny vs. planning tool, etc] ▪ Run qualitative judge interviews before/after roll out to try to get at the channels of impact ▪ [Testing impact of paper-based version of the same intervention would be the “ideal” test. Not feasible: too few judges.]  Can a decrease in treatment delays have an impact at the firm level?  Survival of the firm  Decision to invest, employ, expand  Perception of justice system and demand for legal resolution of business disputes (through series of hypothetical situations)  What is the potential for this type of interventions to improve the business climate?

5. Evaluation Design  Unit of intervention: Court case (Total: 1,800)  Random assignment:  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 ▪ Only cases they are in charge of appear in their pop- ups

6. Pop-Up Chambre President 1/2

7. Pop-Up Chambre President 2/2

8. Pop-Up Clerk 1/2

9. Pop-Up Clerk 2/2

10. Pop-Up Pre-trial Judge 1/2

11. Pop-Up Pre-trial Judge 2/2

12. Sampling and Data  Court-level data:  Administrative data collected directly through the court software (all agents enter the various treatment steps into an interface) ▪ Date of entry and dates of various steps entered >> compute duration and speed ▪ Identify firms for tracking in the firm-level survey  Firm-level data:  2 planned rounds of survey collection ▪ One at the outset ▪ One 1 year later  Issue of censoring: not all cases will be completed over the period of the trial >> use duration models

13. Thank you!