Family Rules: Nepotism in the Mexican Judiciary
Abstract: This paper studies the extent and causes of nepotism in the Mexican judiciary. On average, the arrival of a judge into a judicial circuit results in the hiring of 0.05 relatives to key court positions within the following year, a figure which is probably a lower bound of the overall effect. The observed nepotism is concentrated among judges who have been sanctioned for administrative offenses, which indicates that the hiring of relatives is motivated by rent-seeking rather than by efficiency purposes. Importantly for personnel policy, the effect is concentrated among judges who are assigned to courts located in their state of birth—where jobs might be closer to a wider family network— and among appeal judges—who may have access to larger institutional resources and face lower career incentives.
