Peter Neis

How does free access to legal information affect markets and firm behavior? We examine this question using Indian Kanoon, a free digital legal search platform that was launched in 2008. Using a generalized difference-in-differences approach, we find that the staggered rollout of Kanoon has increased access to justice and court efficiency while maintaining decision quality. Kanoon's introduction also led to substantial changes in firm finances, including significant increases in assets, income, expenditures, and legal charges. The effects are most concentrated among large firms operating in highly regulated sectors. Importantly, these changes extend beyond firms involved in litigation and permeate throughout the broader business landscape. Our findings demonstrate the critical importance of free and unrestricted access to legal information in driving economic progress.

This study investigates the impact of judicial enforcement on environmental outcomes in India, using a unique dataset spanning four decades that includes court cases, pollution data, corporate finances, and infant mortality rates. Leveraging the quasi-random assignment of cases to judges and their writing styles, we find evidence consistent with litigation as scrutiny. Findings show that environmental litigation leads to temporary reductions in pollution and affects firm performance during legal proceedings. However, pollution levels rebound post-litigation, with no significant effect at any time on infant mortality. This highlights the limited efficacy of judicial environmental interventions in highly polluted contexts like India.

This study examines the processing of cases and the results of Muslim litigants at the Patna High Court in Bihar, India, between 2009 and 2019. Using a hand-coded surname dictionary supplemented by a name classifier to infer religious identity in nearly 200,000 cases, we investigate how religious identity shapes legal representation and judicial outcomes. We find that Muslim appellants in criminal cases are 1.9 percentage points more likely to have their appeals dismissed, about 10% above the sample mean, a gap that is robust to controls for filing category, police station, and advocate; they are also 1.3 percentage points less likely to have their appeals allowed, although this gap halves with finer controls for case category. We also document substantial religious sorting in legal representation: Muslim petitioners are approximately 18 percentage points more likely than non-Muslim petitioners to retain Muslim advocates. Yet despite these disparities, we find limited robust evidence that judicial outcomes systematically depend on whether judges and litigants share a religious identity. These findings highlight the distinction between religious disparities in judicial outcomes and the role of religious representation on the bench, raising broader questions about the extent to which judicial diversity alone can address inequalities in access to justice.

We ask whether court performance is associated with labor informality and whether the association looks similar across institutional settings. We compare informal employment with contract-enforcement time across 118 countries and in pooled firm-level data, then examine administrative court records and household surveys in Chile, Croatia, India, Kenya, and Peru, including comparisons across Indian states. In the cross-country sample, longer contract-enforcement times coincide with higher informality, even after accounting for income. Across Indian states, by contrast, the association is accounted for by income. The detailed data reveal distinct dimensions of court performance, including case age, clearance, and backlog trajectories, that broad measures can obscure. These descriptive comparisons leave open whether courts affect informality and whether weak enforcement reflects limited capacity or deliberate forbearance. Separating those mechanisms will require evidence on enforcement choices as well as court capacity.

In many developing countries, informality remains prevalent among firms and workers, while the judicial systems encounter challenges such as substantial backlogs and inefficiencies. This study investigates the potentially ambiguous effect of court efficiency on both margins of formality, formality of firms and workers. First, I introduce judicial efficiency in an equilibrium model. Court efficiency can influence firms' decisions through two distinct channels. Firstly, it may directly impact a firm's productivity, reflecting a more favorable economic environment. Secondly, it can influence the relative cost of hiring formal versus informal labor. By combining case-level data from Indian courts with survey data on firms and workers, I find a significant positive impact of court efficiency on firm formality, predominantly driven by small firms. Additionally, court efficiency reduces the proportion of casual labor in large firms, but does not impact other aspects of informal labor or firms' revenues. A wedge on the relative cost of formal compared to casual labor in formal firms is sufficient to explain these results.

This study investigates the impact of social identity on judicial processes and outcomes at the Patna High Court over a decade (2009 to 2019). We employ machine learning algorithms to infer caste status from surnames (names) in court records. We note that a majority of court participants have ‘caste-neutral’ names. Though we find no evidence of name-based ‘matching’ between litigants and judges, caste-neutral petitioners are 3.3% more likely to choose a caste-neutral advocate. Matching, whether intentional or coincidental, yields notable consequences. Litigants with caste-neutral names who matched with similar judges face a higher likelihood of case dismissal and lower success rates in overturning appeals. However, advocates with caste-neutral names experience less disadvantage in these scenarios. Notably, the adoption of caste-neutral names, while offering some protection, does not fully mitigate the vulnerabilities faced by citizens within India's judicial institutions.

Identifying risk factors of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) for its clinical course became important during the current global health crisis. This study explores the relationship between ambient air quality and the clinical course of COVID-19 during the first German lockdown. Daily air pollutant concentrations (PM10, O3 and NO2) and confirmed COVID-19-related hospital cases and deaths in the four largest German cities are used for multivariate regression analysis to study the correlation of air pollutants with COVID-19-related hospitalised or ICU patients and deaths. A significant positive association of O3 with patients and deaths is observed. NO2 shows a positive correlation with hospitalised and ICU patients. A 10 µg/m³ increase in O3 is linked to a 27% (95% CI: 15% to 39%) increase of COVID-19-related deaths. However, PM10 is associated with a decrease in deaths. Altogether, these findings indicate that air pollutants seem to have a significant influence on the course of COVID-19 infections.