Judicial venality, i.e., the sales of public positions in the judicial sector, was used extensively in France and in Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Offices were bought because judges received trial fees from litigants. Kings sold them because they needed money, at the cost of losing...

We provide an alternative explanation of French legal centralization. To do this we develop a rational choice model of the legal architecture around 1789 and the French Revolution. Following Tocqueville we propose to analyze the French movement towards legal centralization as the result of an...

We consider a simple general equilibrium model with imperfect competition. Firms are price taker in the input market and compete à la Cournot in some or all of the product markets (their technology displays constant returns to scale). We show that an increase in the number of firms does not...

In this paper, we study a notion of sufficient input, i.e. input that allows to produce at least one unit of output when the other inputs are fixed at any positive level. We show that such an input allows to produce any positive amount of production. The main property of sufficient inputs is as...

The benefit function, introduced by Luenberger, provides a tool for well-defined cardinal comparisons of different bundles of goods. It also allows to study in an orignal way optimal consumers and firms choices, Pareto-optimality etc... In this note we prove that the benefit function is...

This paper is a study of money in overlapping generations models with cash-in-advance constraints. We first offer a brief review of different features of the cash-in-advance constraint. Then we propose a general formulation and study the neutrality of money. We show that both neutrality and...

The present paper proposes to interpret the differences in legal systems between common-law and civil- law nations as arising from the importance given to adjudication in comparison with statute laws. It focuses on the relative costs of legal change by adjudication (case law development) when...

A major issue in reforming previously planned economies is the creation of assets markets. In this paper, it is argued that the mere characteristics of the assets to be privatized matter. Indeed, private ownership of land. It is the purpose of this paper to provide a theory of such rate. We make...