Judges and court performance: a case study of district commercial courts in Poland

The goal of this paper is to analyse determinants of the performance of commercial district courts in Poland in the period 2009–2016 in terms of the number of resolved cases. To this end we apply a panel data approach to identify factors affecting court output (i.e. the number of cases adjudicated) and stochastic frontier analysis to investigate determinants of court efficiency in resolving cases. Although we found that the judicial system in Poland is mostly driven by the demand for justice, the results indicate that an increase in the number of judges can significantly enhance the number of resolved cases that require a full court trial. We also found that court efficiency is significantly associated with some auxiliary court staff members and variables capturing economic development of court jurisdiction. Specifically, we found that judge assistants increase court efficiency in resolving commercial cases requiring a full trial and court clerks boost court efficiency in resolving writ-of-payment cases.