Arbitration Awards: Corruption within the Russian Court System

• In Event: Frontiers of Research on Bureaucratic Politics and Management Mini-Conference: Patronage

Abstract

Corruption is often rampant within state bureaucracies and judicial systems, yet we know little about its micro-level consequences on policymaking and the provision of public goods. In this paper, we investigate how corruption undermines the rule of law and property rights protection in one prominent electoral autocracy: Russia. First, we create unique individual-level measures of corruption for nearly 800 arbitration judges working in Moscow, linking financial official disclosures with actual assets help by these officials. We then exploit the fact that judges are randomly assigned to court cases and combine this demographic information with over 200,000 decisions from 2012-2018. We hypothesize that corrupt judges will be more likely to find in favor of wealthier and politically connected plaintiffs, exercise haste in passing down decisions, and are more likely to see their decisions overturned in appeals court. The paper concludes with a discussion of how improving the monitoring and recruitment of state officials could lead to fairer, more competitive market environments.

Authors

• David Szakonyi, Higher School of Economics

• Jordan Luc Gans-Morse, Northwestern University