Scale and scope economies in first-instance courts: Portuguese specialized vs non-specialized courts

This paper analyses the technical efficiency of first-instance courts and investigates the existence of scale and scope economies. To assess the technical efficiency of specialized and non-specialized court benches, we use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). This study uses data from 2015 to 2021, encompassing every bench within the Portuguese first-instance courts, totalling 3249 observations. Our findings reveal diseconomies of scale, with more than half of the benches experiencing increasing returns to scale, indicating that their performance would benefit from increased scale. The scale diseconomies varied by bench type: benches primarily handling civil cases and generic benches faced mostly increasing returns to scale. In contrast, those dealing predominantly with criminal cases experienced decreasing returns to scale. Additionally, we observe diseconomies of scope, indicating that generic and non-specialized benches were less efficient than specialized ones. Overall, this paper provides empirical evidence supporting the notion that the specialization of benches enhances their efficiency.