Judicial Decisions under Pressure: Evidence from the Chinese Judiciary

This paper studies whether caseload pressure changes appellate decision-making. Using 3.3 million Chinese civil appellate decisions from 2013 to 2021, I link appellate outcomes to judge-level workload and written reasoning. I instrument a presiding judge's caseload with the leave-one-out workload of other presiding judges in the same court and month. A doubling of appellate caseload increases the probability that the appellate court upholds the first-instance judgment by about 0.7 percentage points. Heavier caseloads also reduce legal citations and increase textual similarity between first-and second-instance reasoning. The results show that court congestion changes not only how quickly courts process disputes, but also how intensively appellate judges review lower-court decisions.