Has the recent restructuring of the Swedish district courts improved efficiency? : A DEA analysis

This paper conducts an efficiency study on the Swedish district courts following the restructuring in the late 1990s using DEA. The objective is to establish whether the efficiency has improved after a reform that significantly decreased the number of courts. The data is county-based with wages and administrative costs as input and cases settled as output. The results show an overall increase in efficiency. Moreover, many units seem to be operating at decreasing returns to scale