Does Exposure to Concurrent Cases Affect Judicial Decisions? Evidence from the Paris Labor Court

Judges often handle multiple cases in a single court session, raising the question of whether their verdicts are interrelated. This paper examines if judicial outcomes are interrelated utilizing novel data from the Paris Labor Court, where judges concurrently determine the amounts employers must pay employees. Exploiting quasi-random assignment of cases and juries to sessions, we estimate simultaneous Tobit models following a recent method by Xu and Lee (2015) to account for the mass at zero of awarded amounts and the simultaneous nature of decisions. Controlling for characteristics of defendants and plaintiffs, case specifics, session features, and judge attributes, our analysis finds no evidence that compensation amounts awarded to plaintiffs are influenced by those awarded to others in the same session. These findings suggest that simultaneous decision-making may offer a more impartial approach to case handling compared to sequential processes, which prior literature suggests are prone to path dependency.