ESPINOSA Romain

Expungement mechanisms allow first-time offenders to seal their criminal record. Theory predicts that the stigma of a criminal record can hinder the reintegration of criminals for whom legal activities are less lucrative. In theory, expungements priced at the reservation level can facilitate the reintegration of criminals without making first-time crime more attractive. This paper considers a behavioral perspective and offers experimental evidence about the impact of expungements priced at different levels. To do this, we set up a laboratory experiment where subjects repeatedly face opportunities to commit crime (take money from another subject). In addition to stochastic formal sanctions-imposed by the experimenter-we introduce endogenously determined social sanctions. In our main treatments of interest, subjects who choose the wrongful action have the opportunity to expunge their record prior to the second stage, thus avoiding social sanctions as long as they do not recidivate. Overall, our experiment shows that, from a general deterrence perspective, it is better to implement expungements at very high prices. We offer an explanation for this result based on the idea that the price of expungements may signal the moral reprehensibility of the offense.

The animal cause is now at a turning point in its history, as economics is taking a growing interest in the animal question and is particularly concerned about the paradoxical relationship we have with animals: while animal welfare has never been so consensual, more than 3 billion animals are killed every year because of our food choices. This book provides multiple insights into the reasons for such a paradox and reviews the most important theories that can explain this conflict between our values and our actions (cognitive dissonance, public good, heuristics, warm-glow, moral license, reactance, cognitive empathy, social learning). It also offers a practical reading of these theories and analyzes the effectiveness of actions taken in favor of animals by animal rights organizations and the state. It also shows how recent technological developments (meat-like foods and cultured meat) may also help to resolve this paradox.

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We develop a method to assess population knowledge about any given topic. We de- fine, and rationalize, types of beliefs that form the ‘knowledge spectrum’. Using a sample of over 7,000 UK residents, we estimate these beliefs with respect to three topics: an animal-based diet, alcohol consumption and immigration. We construct an information- campaign effectiveness index (ICEI) that predicts the success of an information campaign. Information resistance is greatest for animal-based diets, and the ICEI is highest for immigration. We test the predictive power of our ICEI by simulating information campaigns, which produces supportive evidence. Our method can be used by any government or company that wants to explore the success of an information campaign.

Whilst fundamental to human societies, collective decision-making such as voting systems can lead to non-efficient decisions, as past climate policies demonstrate. Current systems are harshly criticized for the way they consider voters’ needs and knowledge. Collective decision-making is central in human societies but also occurs in animal groups mostly when animals need to choose when and where to move. In these societies, animals balance between the needs of the group members and their own needs and rely on each individual’s (partial) knowledge. We argue that non-human animals and humans share similar collective decision processes, among which are agenda-setting, deliberation and voting. Recent works in artificial intelligence have sought to improve decision-making in human groups, sometimes inspired by animals’ decision-making systems. We discuss here how our societies could benefit from recent advances in ethology and artificial intelligence to improve our collective decision-making system.

We propose and test a model of food policy acceptability. The model is structured in four levels: government, topic, policy, and individual. In this study, we focus on two levels that are actionable for policy-makers: the topic and policy levels. We assess nine factors using a first online survey with 600 UK nationals and replicate our results in a second survey with 588 participants. Our results suggest that three factors have a positive effect on acceptability at the topic level: awareness of the issue, the legitimacy of state intervention, and social norms. At the policy level, we report a positive effect of the policy’s expected effectiveness, its appropriate targeting of consumers, and the perceived support of the majority. On the other hand, more coercive interventions and those generating inequalities are judged to be less acceptable. Additionally, we report an interaction between awareness and coerciveness on acceptability. Participants who are aware of the issue were more likely to support coercive policies. We also find evidence for a trade-off between coerciveness, effectiveness, and acceptability, as more coercive measures are considered more effective, but less acceptable by participants. Our findings offer policy-makers, nutrition experts, and advocates for healthier and more sustainable diets a new and integrated understanding of the underlying factors that determine food policy acceptability.

We study the manipulation of preferences over redistribution. Previous work showed that preferences over redistribution are malleable by the experience of success or failure in a preceding real-effort task. We manipulate the information subjects receive about the importance of chance relative to effort in determining success. We investigate the effect of this manipulation on (i) subjects' redistribution choices affecting third parties, and (ii) preferences for redistributive taxation. Our results show that informing the subjects about the relative importance of chance after the real-effort task does not mitigate the self-serving bias in redistribution choices. Only providing full information before the real-effort task prevents the emergence of the self-serving bias.

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Most infectious diseases in humans originate from animals. In this paper, we explore the role of animal farming and meat consumption in the emergence and amplification of infectious diseases. First, we discuss how meat production increases epidemic risks, either directly through increased contact with wild and farmed animals or indirectly through its impact on the environment (e.g., biodiversity loss, water use, climate change). Traditional food systems such as bushmeat and backyard farming increase the risks of disease transmission from wild animals, while intensive farming amplifies the impact of the disease due to the high density, genetic proximity, increased immunodeficiency, and live transport of farmed animals. Second, we describe the various direct and indirect costs of animal-based infectious diseases, and in particular, how these diseases can negatively impact the economy and the environment. Last, we discuss policies to reduce the social costs of infectious diseases. While existing regulatory frameworks such as the "One Health" approach focus on increasing farms' biosecurity and emergency preparedness, we emphasize the need to better align stakeholders' incentives and to reduce meat consumption. We discuss in particular the implementation of a "zoonotic" Pigouvian tax, and innovations such as insect-based food or cultured meat.

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NGOs often vary in terms of how radical they are. In this paper, we explore the effec-tiveness of NGO discourses in bringing about social change. We focus on animal advocacy:welfarist NGOs primarily seek to improve the conditions in which animals are raised and re-duce meat consumption, while abolitionist NGOs categorically reject animal use and call fora vegan society. We design an experiment to study the respective impact of welfarist and abo-litionist discourses on participants’ beliefs regarding pro-meat justifications and their actions,namely their propensity to engage in the short-run in animal welfare (charity donation, peti-tion against intensive farming) and plant-based diets (subscription to a newsletter promotingplant-based diets, petition supporting vegetarian meals). We first show that both welfarist andabolitionist discourses significantly undermine participants’ pro-meat justifications. Second,the welfarist discourse does not significantly affect participants’ actions, while we detect a po-tential backlash effect of the abolitionist discourse. We show that the NGOs’ positive standardeffect on actions through the change in beliefs is outweighed by a negative behavioral responseto the discourses (reactance effect). Last, greater public-good contributions are associated withgreater engagement in animal welfare in the presence of an NGO discourse.

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While antispeciesism is an ethical notion, veganism is behavioral. In this paper, we examine the links between the two. Building on Blackorby and Donaldson (1992), we consider a two-species model in which humans consume animals. The level of antispeciesism is conceived as the weight on animals' welfare in the utilitarian social welfare function. We show that more antispeciesism increases meat consumption if and only if animals' utility is positive. That is, the critical condition is whether farm animals' lives are worth living. We then empirically explore this condition using a survey. We find that farm-animal experts and frequent meat eaters are more likely to believe that the lives of farm animals are worth living. We finally discuss some issues in the study of animal welfare in economics and social choice.

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This article proposes a first quantitative analysis of the introduction of the scale for unfair dismissal indemnities in France, following the ordinances of autumn 2017. Using an original database, we analyze the discrepancies between the indemnities actually received for cases decided between 2013 and 2017 and the amounts provided by the scale. Seniority appears to be a key criterion for identifying parties sensitive to the scale: employees with low seniority were more likely to receive compensation outside the scale. However, possible indirect effects of the scale are to be considered, such as the multiplication of the number of other heads of claim or their amounts.

This research was conducted by a team federating the skills of economists, jurists and legal practitioners, in response to a call for projects launched in early 2016 by the Mission Recherche Droit et Justice. Supported by two economics laboratories (BETA and CRED), this research focuses on the capacity of a scale to treat equally litigants placed in similar conditions. This question is treated according to three complementary approaches. The first proposes a prospective analysis of the scale, based on a review of the legal economics literature on scales. This literature, which is essentially empirical and focuses on the American case, is rather critical of the ability of scales to achieve their objectives. They would not automatically guarantee greater horizontal equity . they would not necessarily encourage agreements between the parties . they would not guarantee greater severity of sanctions. One of the reasons given is that, when faced with scales, actors, and judges in particular, may develop different attitudes. The second part proposes an empirical analysis ex ante of the introduction of a scale, taking the case of industrial tribunal compensation and using judgments from the Paris Industrial Tribunal prior to the introduction of the mandatory scale in 2017. This descriptive statistical work shows that the amounts obtained are mainly correlated to the section, age and presence of a lawyer (but not to gender). It also examines the effects of a "dummy" application of the 2017 scale. The third part proposes an empirical ex-post analysis of the introduction of a scale, taking the case of the contribution to the maintenance and education of children (CEEE), the determination of which has been governed since the 2010 circular by an indicative scale. Based on the use of six different sources (experimental survey, qualitative survey of judges and four databases of court decisions before and after the scale) and using different econometric methodologies, this section shows that the effect of the scale on the amount of child support and education is not as great as it might seem, This section shows that the homogenization effect attributed to the use of the scale is fairly systematically associated with cases characterized by a pair of divergent parental proposals in terms of CEEE, by a pair of unequal parental incomes in favor of the mother, by a pair of close parental incomes at an intermediate level, or by a pair of consensual and weak parental proposals. On the other hand, the scale would appear to promote disparate outcomes in cases characterized by a zero CSEA offer or in cases characterized by an unequal income couple in favor of the father.

We conduct an experiment where participants choose between actions that provide private benefits but may also impose losses on others. Three legal environments are compared: no law, strict liability for harm caused to third parties, and an efficiently designed negligence rule where damages are paid only when the harmful action generates a net social loss. Legal obligations are either perfectly enforced (Severe Law) or only weakly so (Mild Law), i.e., expected sanctions are then nondeterrent. We find that behavior can be rationalized in terms of individuals trading-off private benefits, net of legal liability, against the net uncompensated losses caused to others. The weight associated with non-incentivized efficiency concerns is increased by the introduction of a liability rule, whether deterrent or not, and there is evidence that the effect is stronger under strict liability than under the negligence rule.

We conduct an experiment where participants choose between actions that provide private benefits but may also impose losses on others. Three legal environments are compared: no law, strict liability for harm caused to third parties, and an efficiently designed negligence rule where damages are paid only when the harmful action generates a net social loss. Legal obligations are either perfectly enforced (Severe Law) or only weakly so (Mild Law), i.e., expected sanctions are then nondeterrent. We find that behavior can be rationalized in terms of individuals trading-off private benefits, net of legal liability, against the net uncompensated losses caused to others. The weight associated with non incentivized efficiency concerns is increased by the introduction of a liability rule, whether deterrent or not, and there is evidence that the effect is stronger under strict liability than under the negligence rule.

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In this paper I investigate the role of e-reputation mechanisms on illegal platforms that specialize in drug sales. I ask whether online reputation systems can limit the risk of scamming (i.e. fraud) by dishonest sellers, and thus prevent Akerlof-like market destruction. I do so by analyzing all published offers on the second-largest platform operating on March 18th 2017 (Hansa). Three types of drugs show relatively low scamming risks, with the average probability that a random seller effectively send the ordered good of over 83%. The recent shutdowns of the two leading platforms are likely to increase this probability by 2.7 to 9.7%. Endogeneity may either lead us to overestimate the effect of e-reputation mechanisms (e.g., unobserved heterogeneity in sellers) or underestimate it (e.g., better-functioning markets may attract more scammers).

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The aim of this paper is to observe how supreme courts use their discretionary power over their dockets to correct appellate courts’ decisions relative to their own interpretation of the law. There are two supreme courts in France, the Conseil d’État for the administrative branch, and the Cour de Cassation for the civil one. In both courts, at different dates though, a reform took place that gave them discretionary control over their dockets. Hence, a difference in the supreme courts’ decisions might be due to either different correction activities, selection strategies, or both. Accordingly, it is necessary to distinguish between them before drawing any conclusions about supreme courts’ behaviors. We develop an econometric approach to assess whether the correction activities are similar between supreme courts, and whether these activities are affected when the supreme courts can select cases. Using an original database of all environmental cases determined by the supreme courts between 1956 and 2010, we rely on a counterfactual approach to compare cases across the courts before and after the reforms. Our study concludes that correction activities do not differ across the courts as long as they are submitted to the same selection rule. We also find that the supreme courts use the possibility of selection to increase their pro-plaintiff correction activities in a way that affects the overall probability of success of plaintiffs and defendants.

This article proposes a discussion of plant food and animal condition as objects of study for economics. It answers three questions: Why should economists be interested in the issue of animal product consumption? What contribution can economics make to existing academic discussions? What are the reasons for the lack of interest of economists in this issue so far? This paper first presents three arguments why economics should take into account the consumption of animal products: an environmental reason, a health reason and an ethical reason. It then presents the behavioral analysis of meat consumption developed in psychology, and discusses how economics could contribute to this field of research (behavioral economics, public policy economics, industrial economics and political economy). The final section offers a more exploratory discussion of the limited interest in these issues by economists to date.

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In this paper, we assess the beliefs of aspiring top civil servants towards the private sector. We use a survey conducted in a French university known for training most of the future high-ranking civil servants and politicians, as well as students who will work in the private sector. Our results show that students aspiring to work in the public sector are more likely to distrust the private sector, to believe that conducting business is easy, and are less likely to see the benefits of public-private partnerships. They are also more likely to believe that private sector workers are self-interested. These results have strong implications for the level of regulation in France, and the cooperation between the public and private sector.

Using a database on French labor courts between 1998 and 2012, we investigate case selection and judicial decision-making. In France, judges are elected at the labor court level on lists proposed by unions, and litigants can first try to settle their case before the judicial hearing. We show that the ideological composition of the court indirectly impacts the settlement behavior of the parties but has no influence on the decision made in court. In addition, parties have self-fulfilling behavior and adapt to institutional rules. When they anticipate long judicial procedures at court, they settle more frequently and only require judicial hearings for complex cases. The duration to decide these complex cases is longer, explaining why they observe (and build their anticipation on) long case duration. Our empirical strategy uses probit, ordered probit and triprobit estimations to control for case selection. JEL codes: K31, K41.

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In 2008, the French government enacted a reform that reduced the number of labor courts by one quarter. This led to significant changes in access to labor courts for many workers and employers who had to travel further to proceed with conflict litigation. We use this reform to evaluate how access to labor courts affects the labor market. Our empirical approach mainly relies on regression-adjusted conditional differences-indifferences estimations. We find that cities that experienced an increase in the distance to their associated labor court suffered from a lower growth rate of job creation (-4 percentage points), job destruction (-4.6 pp) and firm creation (-6.3 pp) between 2007 and 2012 compared to unaffected cities. We find opposite but insignificant effects for cities that experienced a fall in the distance to the labor court. These results emphasize the central role of labor courts for the good functioning of the labor market.

Publisher's presentation: "The Index of Legal Certainty (ILC) is an indicator that empirically evaluates the legal certainty of a national economy in the context of international comparisons. The report was produced by a multidisciplinary team of lawyers and economists on behalf of the Fondation pour le Droit continental and in collaboration with numerous legal practitioners. It defines a specific methodology applied to 10 areas of law in 18 target countries. Original extensions are proposed by crossing the ISJ indicator obtained with other sources such as the World Bank's Rule of Law indicator. The results presented allow us to determine which system offers the most guarantees in terms of legal security. The empirical treatments carried out demonstrate the importance of legal security for a country's economic development and highlight the interest in associating legal security with the rule of law. The Legal Security Index (LSI) argues that reasoned legal security does not imply immobility, minimalism or even the absence of any legislative or regulatory constraints. However, it does imply the accessibility of the law that is effectively applicable, its intelligibility, its predictability, a certain stability over time, and finally the balance between the economic interests of the parties involved. Written in French and English, the Index of Legal Security (ISJ) will allow all those involved in the debate on the economic and legal performance and attractiveness of countries (business lawyers, researchers, or public and private decision-makers) to have access to a renewed approach of the issue.

The back cover states: "The Index of Legal Certainty (ILC) is an indicator that empirically evaluates the legal certainty of a national economy in the context of international comparisons. This report was produced by a multidisciplinary team of lawyers and economists on behalf of the Fondation pour le Droit continental and in relation with numerous legal practitioners. It defines a specific methodology applied to 10 areas of law in 18 target countries. Original extensions are proposed by crossing the ISJ indicator obtained with other sources such as the World Bank's Rule of Law indicator. The results presented make it possible to determine which system offers the most guarantees in terms of legal security. The empirical treatments carried out demonstrate the importance of legal security for the economic development of a country and highlight the interest in associating legal security with the rule of law. The legal security index (ISJ) maintains that reasoned legal security does not imply immobilism, minimalism or even the absence of any legislative or regulatory constraint. However, it implies the accessibility of the law that is actually applicable, its intelligibility, its predictability, a certain stability over time, and finally the balance between the economic interests of the parties involved. Written in French and English, the Legal Security Index (LSI) will allow all those involved in the debate on the economic and legal performance and attractiveness of countries (business lawyers, researchers or public and private decision-makers) to have access to a renewed approach to the issue".

Industrial tribunals have long been the subject of much debate and controversy, but they are nevertheless a key element of effective employment protection legislation. However, few research works in economics have analyzed this institution. Starting from this observation, the objective of this article is to propose a synthesis of the functioning of industrial tribunals, based on quantitative data. We are interested here in the industrial tribunal procedure, i.e. the rules of operation of the industrial tribunals, and not in the content of the legal rules. This synthesis will be guided by the following questions: Why reform industrial tribunals? How to reform them? To answer these questions, we gather in this article essentially quantitative elements on industrial tribunals. We rely on data provided by the Ministry of Justice from 2004 to 2015. We first present the difficulties that industrial tribunals face and that call for reforming this institution. We then use the tools of legal economic analysis to analyze the recent reforms of this institution, as well as some future avenues for reform. Finally, we discuss in conclusion the stakes, the difficulties and the perspectives of research on this theme.

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The uncertainty surrounding the outcome of industrial tribunal proceedings is often pointed out as a possible obstacle to hiring. This uncertainty is partly generated by the fact that similar cases brought before the industrial tribunal are judged very differently from one case to another, or from one jurisdiction to another. After recalling the historical objective of the industrial tribunal system, its mode of operation and its recent developments, this note shows that the decisions rendered by the industrial tribunals do indeed vary greatly from one jurisdiction to another. The source of this variability remains uncertain: it may reflect the arbitrary nature of industrial tribunal justice as much as the fact that the cases judged by the different jurisdictions are of a different nature and gravity. Finally, this paper draws on the work of Desrieux and Espinosa to show that the union membership of judges elected by employees does not influence the decisions rendered by the industrial tribunals. This result makes it possible to rule out a possible source of bias in the justice rendered by the various industrial tribunals.

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The uncertainty about the outcomes of proceedings before France’s employment tribunals (“les conseils de prud’hommes”, also known as “les prud’hommes”) is often pointed to as a possible damper on hiring of new staff. This uncertainty would appear to be generated in part by the fact that similar cases brought before them seem to be judged differently from one time to another or from one tribunal to another. After recalling the historic aim of the “institution prud’homale”, the way it works, and recent changes to it, this policy brief shows that the decisions rendered by the French employment tribunals do indeed vary strongly from one tribunal to another. However, the source of this variability remains in doubt: it might equally well reflect the arbitrary nature of “prud’homale” justice as the fact that the cases judged by the various tribunals are of different natures and of different seriousness. Finally, this policy brief uses the work of Desrieux and Espinosa to show that union membership of the judges elected by employees does not influence the decisions rendered by the French employment tribunals. These findings make it possible to dismiss a possible source of partiality in the justice rendered by the various tribunals.

The uncertainty about the outcomes of proceedings before France’s employment tribunals (“les conseils de prud’hommes”, also known as “les prud’hommes”) is often pointed to as a possible damper on hiring of new staff. This uncertainty would appear to be generated in part by the fact that similar cases brought before them seem to be judged differently from one time to another or from one tribunal to another. After recalling the historic aim of the “institution prud’homale”, the way it works, and recent changes to it, this policy brief shows that the decisions rendered by the French employment tribunals do indeed vary strongly from one tribunal to another. However, the source of this variability remains in doubt: it might equally well reflect the arbitrary nature of “prud’homale” justice as the fact that the cases judged by the various tribunals are of different natures and of different seriousness. Finally, this policy brief uses the work of Desrieux and Espinosa to show that union membership of the judges elected by employees does not influence the decisions rendered by the French employment tribunals. These findings make it possible to dismiss a possible source of partiality in the justice rendered by the various tribunals.

This article empirically assesses the relevance of three theories of judicial decision-making for the French Constitutional Council. Our empirical analysis follows previous works by integrating more recent observations, and proposes a new methodology by exploiting new data for cases post 1995. After analyzing the 612 cases published between 1974 and 2013, we focus on cases post 1995 for which we know the exact composition of the court. Our results suggest that (1) political/ideological voting occurs, (2) Justices restrain themselves from invalidating laws, and (3) a court's independence suffers from political power concentration in other institutions. All in all, these results suggest the need for a reform of the Constitutional Council to strengthen its independence. keyword constitutional court, attitudinal model, judicial self-restraint, opportunistic independence , judicial decision-making, politicization, judicial independence.

The recent ordinances of Emmanuel Macron have brought about profound changes in French labor law. More specifically, the third ordinance of the new government has instituted a framework of prud'homale compensation for employees in the event of dismissal. The objective of this reform is to strengthen the forecasting of labour tribunal decisions, which are considered by the employers' federations to be too uncertain. It would also seek to promote the development of smaller companies by limiting their legal risk. However, some criticize these provisions for their possible bias in favour of company directors, to the detriment of employees who potentially suffer heavy damages in the event of dismissal, which should be evaluated on an individual basis. This conference, which was open to the public, brought together three speakers to discuss the relevance and the expected effects of a framework for labour compensation. The objective was to provide a cross-section of economists, jurists, and legal practitioners.

We explore the impact of the self-serving bias on the supply and demand for redistribution. We present results from an experiment in which participants decide on redistribution after performing a real e↵ort task. Dependent on individual performance, participants are divided into two groups, successful and unsuccessful. Participants' success is exogenously determined, because they are randomly assigned to either a hard or easy task. However, because participants are not told which task they were assigned to, there is ambiguity as to whether success or failure should be attributed to internal or external factors. Participants take two redistribution decisions. First, they choose a supply of redistribution in a situation where no personal interests are at stake. Second, they choose a redistributive system behind a veil of ignorance. Our results confirm and expand previous findings on the self-serving bias: successful participants are more likely to attribute their success to their e↵ort rather than luck, and they opt for less redistribution. Unsuccessful participants tend to attribute their failure to external factors and opt for more redistribution. We demonstrate that the self-serving bias contributes to a polarization of the views on redistribution.

The need to provide a high-quality justice at reasonable cost represents a current challenge for many public authorities. Many reform projects propose to remove some courts in order to rationalize the judiciary. This paper explores the 2008 French reform of labor courts (removing 20% of the courts) to empirically investigate the determinants of the removal decision, and its consequences on caseload and case duration in the remaining courts. This represents -to our knowledge- the first attempt to evaluate the impacts of courts’ removal. Using panel data, our empirical strategy is based on probit estimations, counterfactuals, as well as 3SLS estimations. Our results show that the reform targeted small and concentrated courts. At the aggregated national level, it appears that duration did not increase, but the demand for litigation decreased. Locally, we find that courts were affected in different ways according to the relative burden they took on.

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Unique in the French jurisdictional landscape, the industrial tribunals settle disputes related to employment contracts between employers and employees. Justice is dispensed by labor court advisors, proposed by trade unions and elected at the level of each jurisdiction by employees and employers according to a principle of parity. The union composition of each council therefore varies from one jurisdiction to another. The following article looks at the influence of the union composition of the boards on the strategies of the parties and the outcome of litigation. The results are commented by Florence Audier, economist.

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).

In the wake of the pioneering work carried out in the United States over the last twenty years, European studies have recently highlighted the salient flaws in the decision-making process of the Supreme Courts of Portugal, Spain and Italy. A similar study has just been conducted in France on the Constitutional Council, analyzing its functioning and the factors that may have influenced the decisions rendered since 1974. It concludes that the same phenomena can be observed there: the weight of ideological and political considerations in decision-making, reluctance to censure due to a lack of independence, and the need to rethink the appointment mechanisms.

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This paper investigates the impact of constitutional rights on the level of public expenditure in a large sample of countries. To do so, we construct a panel of 73 countries from 1960 to 2011. We first investigate factors that drive constitutional changes regarding constitutional rights. To address potential endogeneity concerns in the choice of constitutional rules, we rely on an instrumental variable within estimation (country and time fixed effects) to estimate the impact of constitutional rights on government size. We find that larger governments tend to inscribe fewer rights in their constitutions, but we do not detect any impact of constitutional rights on the government size.

Although democracy is today the most common form of government, the Law and Economics literature has neglected for a long time the role of social preferences in lawmaking. This article aims at capturing the endogenous process of lawmaking: in democracies, people partly determine the law they have to respect. To do so, I construct a theoretical model of lawmaking in democratic countries with three agents: the population, the legislator and the judge. The normative analysis focuses on systems that favor legal stability. The article concludes that the judge’s interpretation power should be higher in the case of sensitive legal fields. I use this framework to derive guidelines for policy-making in the field of copyright infringement.