Economic analysis of the legal norm: from its constitutional origins to its implementation by the judge.

Summary Questions of legitimacy and stability of political systems have long been studied separately from problems of implementation of law in economics. The objective of this thesis is to reconcile these different approaches in order to place the implementation of the legal norm at the center of the institutional debate. This work is broken down into five empirical or experimental investigations, each of which focuses on one of the stages of the political and judicial process.The first article focuses on the impact of constitutional rights on public spending. The second study explores the influence of self-indulgence bias on the demand for and supply of redistribution. The third work analyzes the decisions rendered by the Constitutional Council. The fourth part examines the 2008 reform of the judicial map of the Conseils de Prud'hommes. The last chapter studies the relationship between the union composition of Labor Courts and the outcomes of the litigations that are brought to them.Our analyses are based on econometric and experimental tools. They make use of classical estimation methods (OLS, GLS, Probit, Logit, Within OLS), selection models (Heckman, Triprobit), tools for endogeneity problems (2SLS) and techniques for estimating equation systems (3SLS). The experimental approach also includes commonly applied statistical tests (permutation tests, mean comparison tests, proportion tests) as well as recent methods for dealing with heterogeneity (wild clustering).