Courts and Banks: Effects of Judicial Enforcement on Credit Markets

The cost of enforcing contracts is a key determinant of market performance. We document this point with reference to the credit market. We start by presenting a model of opportunistic debtors and inefficient courts. According to the model, improvements in judicial efficiency reduce credit rationing and increase lending, while have an ambiguous effect on interest rates, depending on banking competition and on the type of judicial reform. These predictions are supported by panel data on Italian provinces and by cross-country evidence. In Italian provinces with longer trials or large backlogs of pending trials, credit is less widely available than elsewhere. International evidence also shows that the depth of mortgage markets is inversely related to costs of mortgage foreclosure and other proxies for judicial inefficiency.