# V Statistical Analysis

In this paper we do not analyze procedures that arrived to the court as a settlement without having initiated as a lawsuit ...led by the worker. In addition, we limit our analysis to lawsuits related to ...ring, which constitute the vast majority of lawsuits in the database.

We ...rst report descriptive statistics of lawsuits in our sample. We then present kernel-density estimations that show the distribution of awards and the relationship between awards and claims. Finally we describe our econometric results, which present a story consistent with the intuition provided by the descriptive statistics and by the kernel-density graphs.

Table 1 reports several statistics on lawsuits, including statistics on how lawsuits are resolved. Around 70% of lawsuits are settled, and among the 30% that are not, slightly more than half are dropped and slightly less than half go to trial. We ...nd quite similar results in the two tribunals we study. Table 1, like all tables in the paper, is calculated using the inverse of the ex-ante probability of a lawsuit being included in the sample as weights. This is done to approximate what we would have estimated if we had collected data from a census of lawsuits from each tribunal. This weighting procedure essentially adds more weight to lawsuits in years with more total lawsuits, since each sampled lawsuit in these years “represents”a larger number of lawsuits.

Table 1 also shows summary statistics for several other variables, including the award received by the employee. All monetary variables are converted to their equivalent value in December 1998 pesos. The employee’s claim simply measures the amount of money requested by the plainti¤ in the lawsuit. We also include our two imputed claims, that is, what Mexican labor law would award to the worker based only on facts of the case that are veri...able relatively easily such as dates worked and salary. Based on these easily veri...able facts, the ...rst estimation assumes the worker was ...red without justi...cation, while the second assumes that the worker was ...red with justi...cation. Additionally we report the percentage of the claim obtained by the employee. Note that employees receive substantially less than they ask for, in particular, we do not ...nd that they receive on average half of what they request, as the literature on arbitration might suggest. Bearing in mind that when ...rms answer the lawsuit they often acknowledge some positive amount of money owed to the worker, the amount obtained by workers is far from what “splitting the di¤erence” would suggest.<sup>42</sup> Finally, table 1 reports statistics on the percent of litigants who are female, the percent of litigants with “at will”contracts (typically, but not always, white collar workers), tenure at the ...rm, and the percent of litigants with 15 years of tenure or more. These variables will serve as control variables

> 42 Note that average award is less than 10% of average claim in one tribunal, and around 23% in the other. However, the average percentage obtained by the worker is closer to 30%. This di¤erence arises because the percentage statistic computes the average of the percentage that each worker obtains of his claim, rather than the average award divided by the average claim.

17