1 The Role of Justice in Development: Empirical Evidence 9 environment of strife and conflict that leads firms to misallocate labor towards protection rather than towards productive tasks (T. Besley and Mueller, 2018). On the other hand, firms that are associated with the executive or the military (or those in power, more broadly) benefit from monopolistic distortions to the disadvantage of other firms (Guidolin and La Ferrara, 2007; Brown and Huang, 2017).

# **Legal Aid for Vulnerable Populations**

The of justice can only be realized if citizens and have access to justice institutions. According to the World Justice Project (2019), 5.1 billion people–approximately twothirds of the world’s population–lack meaningful access to justice. This includes 1.4 billion people who have a criminal, civil, or administrative justice problem they cannot solve, and at least 253 million people who live in extreme conditions of injustice.

Interventions that empower clients of the judicial system may yield especially when the clients are unaware of their legal rights. Scholarship shows most of these interventions strengthen clients’ ability to obtain a remedy for their grievances. In fact, in the parts of the world where formal legal services are out of reach for people with modest means, they hold great promise as an alternative model of providing affordable and accessible advice or representation. Legal aid may also provide valuable assistance to vulnerable populations in high-income countries. The papers in this section show that legal aid may affect a wide range of outcomes. This assistance may be valuable to address essential aspects of citizens’ well-being across contexts.

In rural Kenya–a setting with very low access to formal institutions but with many land disputes–Aberra and Chemin (2018) gave access to the legal system to a treatment group by offering the services of a free lawyer for 2 years. The authors find relevant impacts of access to justice on farmers’ incentives to exert efforts and invest. Those who received the free lawyer increased the number of days worked on their land by 15% in comparison to those who did not. In addition, their investment increased by 21%, access to credit increased by 56%, and agricultural production increased by 42%. This experiment, which took place in a location where most people are small-scale farmers working and investing on their plot of land, provides evidence of the potential economic impact of providing access to legal aid for citizens with limited access to justice. These results are consistent with another study in Liberia where Sandefur and Siddiqi (2013) offered paralegals to a randomly selected treatment group. The authors find that this offer led to an increase in food security and household well-being.

Legal aid in housing-related interventions produced remarkable results in the United States. Seron et al. (2001) track the results of a legal assistance program for low-income tenants in New York City’s Housing Court. They find that legal counsel produces significant differences, as tenants who received aid are less likely to be evicted or denied rent abatement or repairs by landlords. These changes in outcomes are independent of the merits of the clients’ case. Greiner, Pattanayak, and Hennessy (2013) observe a similar result when they offer limited or full legal assistance to occupants facing eviction in Boston. Approximately two-thirds of occupants in the treated group and one-third of occupants in the control group retained possession of their units at the end of litigation. Moreover, treated-group occupants received more payments or rent waivers worth a net of 7.5 months of rent per case than their control-group counterparts, on average.

In addition, predictive analytics may be relevant to understand when legal aid may be more helpful to resolve disputes. In Mexico, the rate of settlement in specialized labor courts remains low because of overconfidence on the client-side and low-quality legal representation (Sadka, Seira, and Woodruff, 2017). Many plaintiffs spent more on legal fees than what they recovered. Quality legal aid and clear predictions about the length of the trial are both effective in correcting these erroneous