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Fields Changed

Registration

Field Before After
Trial Status on_going completed
Last Published August 05, 2019 11:10 AM May 08, 2025 10:18 PM
Study Withdrawn No
Intervention Completion Date December 31, 2020
Data Collection Complete Yes
Final Sample Size: Number of Clusters (Unit of Randomization) 267 unions.
Was attrition correlated with treatment status? No
Final Sample Size: Total Number of Observations 6,813 households; 849 government officials; 228 digitized administrative records from unions; 267 digitized administrative records from district courts
Final Sample Size (or Number of Clusters) by Treatment Arms 178 treatment unions and 89 control unions
Is there a restricted access data set available on request? No
Program Files No
Data Collection Completion Date December 31, 2020
Is data available for public use? No
Keyword(s) Governance Governance
Public analysis plan No Yes
Public locations No Yes
Building on Existing Work No
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Papers

Field Before After
Paper Abstract Dispute resolution in low-income countries is typically done by either a costly and slow formal court or an informal institution without state-sanctioned enforcement powers. Can access to justice be increased by combining the best aspects of formal and informal institutions? We evaluate the effects of “Village Courts” (VCs) in rural Bangladesh using a large-scale field experiment. The introduction of VCs more than doubles the share of disputes resolved in state sanctioned courts, but an informal institution called shalish remains dominant. There is some substitution from shalish to VCs, but congestion in higher-level courts, village social dynamics, and economic activity remain unaffected.
Paper Citation Mattsson, M., & Mobarak, A. M. (2024). Formalizing dispute resolution: Effects of village courts in Bangladesh. Working Paper.
Paper URL https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4740074
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