Secondary Outcomes (end points)
• Adjournments disaggregated by reason for adjournment. In particular, adjournments can be “internal”, i.e., under the control of the judge (e.g., court not sitting) or “external”, i.e., caused by other parties (e.g., lawyer not ready).
• Case clearance rate (cases disposed of divided by cases filed) as a standard measure of productivity of courts, as well as cases disposed, cases filed
• Time to disposition: Considering the feedback forms were only sent once in January 2019, it may seem unreasonable to expect an effect on the time to disposition of cases. If additional feedback forms can be sent in 2020 and 2021 every month for a duration of one year, there may be an effect on time to disposition. Since the study period is only a year and given that it takes an average of seven months to resolve a criminal case, it is reasonable to expect an effect on the time to resolve criminal cases. In contrast, it takes on average four years to resolve a civil case, so it may be harder to detect an effect on the time to disposition of civil cases--however, some categories of civil cases are resolved faster than others, so we will narrow down on these categories by considering all case types that are resolved (on average) within the course of a year.
• Backlog (percentage of cases that have been pending for more than 1 year)
• Age of case resolved (to see whether judges decide to resolve new versus older cases)
• Time taken for case hearing
• Time taken from filing to first hearing of cases
• Legal representation
• Quality: appeal rates, conviction, dismissal
• Access: total caseload
From digitization of cases extracted from Kenya Law database at the High Court level:
• assignment of judge to litigant [both a check-of and distortion of random assignment]
• decision direction
• whether the decision is appealed
• citation count of the decision, length of decision, number of laws/acts cited in the judgement, how many times the judgement in question has been cited
• time to disposition [if scrapeable from the text of the data]
• number of published cases
• gender slant, gender access to courts
• If possible to identify economic disputes (contracts, security of property rights, credit), number of such cases; time to disposition and direction of decision in favor of certain parties (creditors versus lenders, or big firms versus individuals)
For the above data at the High Court level, the research plan includes further subgroup analyses by:
• Proportion of lower courts treated (since cases for lower-level courts will percolate the High Courts)
Additionally, a daily event study when the lower court decisions percolate into the higher court will be implemented. The dates of the lower court filing or resolution might be used as separate event study dates along side the treatment dates of the lower courts, to check whether the quality of decisions at the lower-level courts impacts the process of cases at the High Court level.
Other analysis if data is available:
• If court user satisfaction surveys are available: satisfaction with court services
• If employee surveys are available: use of case management, motivation
• If CUC meeting minutes are available: procedures put in place to deal with adjournments
• If PMMU evaluations are available: evaluation score, court use of funds (compliance of courts with budget utilization of allocated funds), attendance of judges to the yearly judicial training
If there is an effect on adjournment and time to disposition (especially if the additional feedback forms are sent in 2020 and 2021 every month for a duration of one year), then we may expect downstream economic effects:
• If Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey: investment, business creation, access to credit, consumption
• If World Bank Enterprise Surveys is available: contracting behavior, trust in courts, courts as obstacles to business
Multiple hypothesis testing will be done with the Sharpened False Discovery Rate (FDR) adjusted q-values (Anderson, 2008).