@article{Assignments:4029, recid = {4029}, author = {del Villar Ortiz Mena, Francisco de Asis}, title = {Detection of Irregular Assignments of Cases to Judges}, publisher = {University of Chicago}, school = {Ph.D.}, address = {2022-06}, pages = {80}, 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.}, url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4029}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.4029}, }