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Abstract

This thesis develops tools to detect irregular assignments of cases to judges and applies them to Ecuador's judicial system.It derives the sharp bounds on the overall, court-specific, and judge-specific probabilities that a case's assignment is inconsistent with existing regulations. The bounds rely on administrative case assignment data and one, or both, of the following assumptions: (i) that certain observed case characteristics do not influence which judge a case should be assigned to, and (ii) that the probability distribution over the judges that each case should be assigned to is known (e.g. uniform, random assignment). I construct a database of all publicly-available case assignments in Ecuador's district courts, with over two million assignments from 2016 to 2020 and I find 6.6% of judges to be involved in irregular assignments and 2.6% of assignments, or 58 thousand assignments, to be irregular overall.

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