Our study analyses 6 million civil judgments in China from 2014 to 2018, documenting gender disparities that disfavour female litigants. We investigate the impact of an open justice reform that mandated courts to broadcast legal proceedings live on a centralized online platform. By exploiting variations in its implementation across courts and over time and employing both difference-in-differences and Bartik IV approaches, we find that gender disparities in chances of winning decrease as broadcast intensity increases. Analysis of the textual content of judicial decisions provides further evidence that these changes in judicial outcomes stem from altered judge behaviours (i.e. attention and effort) under enhanced judicial transparency. Our results demonstrate how information technology shapes judges’ conduct, underscoring its broader potential to improve accountability in public institutions.

This paper provides new insights on consumers payment choice by comparing cost of paying with cash to paying with cards. Our novel method accounts for how much change is received in the form of banknotes and metal coins, assuming that the weight and size of coins are inconvenient to carry. We use the regression discontinuity design approach to estimate the model using the 2013 Bank of Canada Method-of-Payments Survey and find a significant number of cash users who switch to paying with debit or credit cards at transaction values marginally above 5 and 10. We attribute this finding to the burden of receiving coins as change associated with the currency denomination structure. Our proposed methodology is general and can be applied to other countries and institutional details.