The impact of Presidential appointment of judges: Montesquieu or the Federalists? BY SULTAN MEHMOOD∗ March 2021 A central question in development economics is whether there are adequate checks and balances on the executive. This paper provides causal evidence on how increasing constraints on the executive, through removal of Presidential discretion in judicial appointments, promotes rule of law. The age structure of judges at the time of the reform and the mandatory retirement age law provide us with an exogenous source of variation in the removal of Presidential discretion in judicial appointments. According to our estimates, Presidential appointment of judges results in additional land expropriations by the government worth 0.14 percent of GDP every year. (JEL D02, O17, K11, K40). Keywords: President, judges, property rights, court subversion, expropriation risk. ∗ Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP) and New Economic School (E-mail:
[email protected]). First Draft: August 2016. This Version: March 2021. A previous version of this paper was entitled, Judicial Independence and Economic Development: Evidence from Pakistan. I would like to thank Eric Brousseau, Daron Acemoglu, Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, Andrei Shleifer, Daniel Chen, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Ruben Enikolopov, James Robinson, Henrik Sigstad, Ruixue Jia, Saad Gulzar, Yasir Khan, Jean-Philippe Platteau, Thierry Verdier, Sergei Guriev, William Howell, Georg Vanberg, Anandi Mani, Adam Szeidl, Monika Nalepa, Nico Voigtlaender, Christian Dippel, Paola Giuliano, Thomas