Labor Institutions & the Judiciary in the XXI century – LIJ-XXI

The LIJ-XXI research project wishes to focus its attention on French Labor Justice, indeed one of the most harshly debated topics in the national political agenda. Judicial enforcement in this jurisdiction is often accused of poor performances both in terms of excessive litigiousness and lengthy delays, also raising the concerns of international organizations as the European Court of Human Rights. The relevance of this matter of contention is that, while French labor legislation is itself very rigid compared to other developed countries, it has been shown that an ineffective enforcement of such regulation may further hinder labor market’s dynamism: this is because even the most efficiently designed rule will at best be ineffective if not properly enforced.
However, while the government has attempted to tackle this problem with several reform proposals, similar discussions are often not supported by an appropriately multidisciplinary debate. The goal of this project is to exploit the expertise of both lawyers and economists in order to supply a comprehensive investigation of French Labor Courts’ functioning. In this regard, our objective is to conciliate the need of simplification required by economics’ modelling with the necessity of conducting a realistic analysis of legal phenomena. This will be made possible by a preliminary theoretical investigation that will allow us to correctly frame this problem and thus make it possible to minimize the efforts related to data gathering and design an unbiased empirical analysis.
Within this framework, the LIJ-XXI research project wishes to propose three original contributions to the topic. First of all, we will focus our attention on the application to the French Labor Justice of two concepts – efficiency and effectiveness – that are often, mistakenly, used as synonyms in the political debate. Accordingly, after having assembled a comprehensive dataset on courts’ activity, we will estimate several measures of performance, which will allow us to understand whether tribunals are inefficient or simply undersized with respect to their task. The second contribution will consist in an econometric study that will shed light on the determinants of performance indicators, testing the impact of the socio-economic factors underlying the labor demand of justice. Economic recessions and the consequent surge in the amount of terminations might imply a sharp increase in the number of cases filed, thus “engulfing” courts and hindering their processing capacity. The third and final contribution will entail an econometric analysis of the impact of ideology on the performance of these courts. Ideology plays a relevant role in the election of judges representing workers. We will thus test the hypothesis that ideology might potentially reflect on performance, as more adversarial courts could be relatively more supportive of labor litigation, thus affecting the amount of cases brought to courts’ attention and also the likelihood of a case to be settled and thus disposed quickly.