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Richard Posner's "What Do Judges and Justices Maximize?" (1993b) is not, as usually believed, the first analysis of judges' behaviors made by using the assumption that judges are rational and maximize a utility function. That analysis arrived at the end of a rather long process. This paper recounts the history of this process, from the "birth" of law and economics in the 1960s to 1993. We show that economic analyses of judges' behavior were introduced in the early 1970s under the pen of Posner. At that time, rationality was not modeled in terms of utility maximization. Utility maximization came later. We also show that rationality and incentives were introduced to explain the efficiency of common law. Around this theme, a controversy took place that led Posner and other economists to postpone their analysis of judicial behavior until the 1990s. By then, the situation had changed. New and conclusive evidence of judges' utility maximizing behavior demanded a general theory to be expressed. In addition, the context was favorable to Chicago economists. It was time for Posner to publish his article.

AbstractIn the present paper we contribute to the previous literature on de facto enforcing mechanisms, by focusing on the role of judicial institutions and their performance and measurement. We propose both theoretical and empirical evidence supporting the necessity of a clear distinction between two measures of judicial performance, efficiency and efficacy, which have often been confused in previous literature. Not only might economic actors not be affected to the same extent by these two indicators, but we show that these measures do not even correlate significantly with each other. We also bring evidence against the alleged trade-off between the quality of justice and judicial performance in its quantitative dimension, showing that this relationship is much more complicated than is claimed by some legal scholars.

Este artículo investiga qué tipo de cambios institucionales tienen un mayor impacto en el crecimiento económico de largo plazo: las reformas de carácter tecnocrático orientadas a la economía o la democratización. Con este objetivo, para el caso de España, examinamos el Plan de Estabilización de 1959 y la Transición a la democracia (en torno a 1979) como fuentes de variación para las 50 provincias españolas en el período 1950-2016. Nuestro enfoque consiste en estudiar los impactos mediante la estimación de los escenarios contrafactuales utilizando el método de control sintético. Nuestros resultados muestran que las dos estrategias tienen un impacto positivo sobre el crecimiento económico subnacional. Una comparación directa entre ambas apunta a que el efecto del Plan de Estabilización pudo ser cuatro veces mayor que el de la Transición. El efecto medio del Plan sobre el crecimiento es aproximadamente un 40 % mayor que en el escenario contrafactual y parece ser permanente. Los efectos estimados se mantienen frente a diferentes pruebas de placebo y otros contrastes adicionales de robustez. En cuanto al análisis de las medidas específicas del Plan de 1959, parece que las políticas de carácter interno generaron un impacto más positivo y de mayor alcance que las externas, dependientes del acceso al FMI. ; We examine the contribution of economic and institutional transitions as two potential sources of subnational economic growth in Spain. To this end, we exploit the economic reforms of the 1959 Stabilization Plan (as an example of technocratic, economy-oriented reform) and the democratic transition in 1979 in Spain as the sources of variation for a sample of 50 Spanish provinces in the period 1950-2016. Our approach is to examine the impacts by estimating the missing counterfactual scenarios using the synthetic control method. Our results unveil a positive effect for both economic and institutional transitions on subnational economic growth. A direct comparison of both transitions suggests that the effect of economic liberalization is four-fold higher than the effect of political liberalization. The average growth effect of the economic liberalization is around 40% higher relative to the counterfactual scenario and it appears to be permanent. The estimated effects are robust to the variety of placebo tests and additional robustness checks. This article also deepens the analysis of the effects of the 1959 plan and finds that the policies that generated the most positive impact were those of an "internal" nature, compared to the external ones, dependent on access to the IMF (also positive, but of lesser impact).