the new law than unsecured ones, the eect is more pronounced on long-term debt, which is known to be more correlated with secured debt. Brazilian judicial districts are highly heterogeneous in terms of eciency. In some districts, cases are closed within time frames comparable to those observed in the United States. In others, the functioning of courts is undermined by the large number of pending cases. Therefore, when the new bankruptcy law entered into force, the eciency of local courts became a key determinant of the ability of both creditors and rms to reap the benets of the reform. Ponticelli and Alencar (2016) exploit variation in the congestion of civil courts across Brazilian municipalities to estimate the eect of enforcement of the new bankruptcy law on rm access to nance, investment, and size. The paper assessed the impact of a potential misallocation frictionthe ineciency of local judicial institutions -on credit markets as well as rm investment and growth. They nd that rms operating in municipalities with less congested courts experienced a larger increase in the use of secured loans, as well as a larger increase in investment and value of output in the years after the reform. To establish the direction of causality, they use an instrumental variable strategy that exploits dierences in court congestion across otherwise similar neighboring municipalities located across judicial district borders within the same state. The evidence shows that dierences in court enforcement aect the impact of bankruptcy reform on rm access to nance, investment, and size. The authors argue that their results make the case that an ecient judiciary is a necessary precondition for rms to benet from these reforms. In this sense, to increase the impact of reforms on productivity it is important to nd the right balance between promoting necessary changes in legal rules and investing to increase the eciency of the judicial institutions in charge of enforcing. Judicial decisions in bankruptcy are often inuenced by the goal to preserve employment in nancially distressed rms. Araujo et al. (2021) construct a new court-level measure of pro-labor bias based on the text of judicial decisions and exploit the random assignment of cases to courts within judicial districts in the state of São Paulo in Brazil to study the eect of pro-labor bias on labor market outcomes. They motivate their focus on Brazil for a number of reasons. First, Brazil has relatively strict labor-protection laws and a judicial system often described by local observers as biased in favor of debtors and workers. They cite survey evidence that shows that a large fraction of the Brazilian Judiciary perceives itself as having a redistributive role. Second, according to the data collected for the paper, there is a large degree of variation in the degree of pro-labor bias across Brazilian courts dealing with bankruptcy cases. They nd that workers of rms assigned to high-pro-labor courts experience 4.4 percent lower post-bankruptcy earnings. They also try to identify what explains the negative eect of pro-labor bias on workers' earnings. They show that courts with higher pro-labor bias tend to facilitate the continuation of insolvent rms, by either rejecting liquidation requests at a 27