Searching for the source of technical inefficiency in Italian judicial districts: an empirical investigation

In this paper, we conducted a two-stage analysis of technical efficiency
in Italian judicial districts by focusing on civil cases in 2006. Unlike most of the
works that apply the Data Envelopment Analysis technique to study the justice
sector, in the first stage, we employed the smoothed bootstrap procedure to generate
unbiased technical efficiency estimates. In the second stage, we used a semi-parametric
technique (Simar and Wilson in J Econom 136(1): 31–64, 2007) that produces
a robust inference for an unknown serial correlation between efficiency
scores. Our results show that technical efficiency is explained by demand factors
and supports the conclusion that opportunistic behaviour from both claimants and
lawyers negatively affects technical efficiency in Italian judicial districts.