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 in this paper a duopoly competing in quantities and where�firms can invest in R&D to control their emissions. We distinguish between effort carried out to acquire first-hand knowledge (original R&D)and effort to develop an absorptive capacity to be able to capture part of the...

In this paper, we consider a duopoly competing in quantity, where firms can invest in R&D to control their emissions. We distinguish between efforts carried out to acquire first-hand knowledge (inventive R&D) and efforts made to develop an absorptive capacity to be able to capture part of the...

We consider a duopoly competing in quantity, where firms can invest in both innovative and absorptive R&D to reduce their unit production cost, and where they benefit from free R&D spillovers between them. We analyze the case where firms act non cooperatively and the case where they cooperate by...