Ano: 2011
Código: WPE – 240
Autores/Pesquisadores:
- Luciana Luk-Tai Yeung
- Paulo Furquim de Azevedo
Abstract:
When judges are believed to be politically biased, many nasty predictions may derive from it. Economic literature in Brazil shows some controversies over what is the direction of the bias, but mainly, economists believe that courts tend to favor debtors, leading to high disincentives for investment decisions and credit granting. Oddly, this controversial debate has never been accompanied by empirical data. This paper aims to test the hypothesis of the existence of a pro-debtor bias in Brazilian courts. A population of 1,687 decisions of the STJ (Superior Tribunal de Justiça) over private debts was analyzed case by case, and the variables were regressed in a logit model. Results indicate that the phenomenon of judicial bias is far more complex than authors have implied, and its existence, in any direction, was not confirmed by data.