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The cost of judicial expertise in the inquisitorial and adversarial procedures. We compare the inquisitorial and the adversarial procedures, in a framework close to the one of Dewatripont and Tirole [1999], according to two criteria : the expected cost of expertise and the expected cost of errors. Our main contribution concerns the cost of the research efforts of the experts. We assume that an expert may benefit from economies of scale during the conduct of his expertise. When economies of scale are important, the expected cost of expertise is lower in the inquisitorial procedure. For lower values of the economies of scale, the results are ambiguous. The expected cost of errors is lower in the adversarial procedure. Thus, our results show that, during the choice of the procedure to be used, there may be a trade-off between the expected cost of expertise and the expected cost of errors. Classification JEL : K40, D81.

An evaluation of the impact of working conditions' improvements on return to work after a cancer. We evaluate the impact of working conditions' improvements on return to work after a cancer. Applying several matching methods, we find that, ceteris paribus, the improvement of working conditions strongly increases the probability of coming back to work and improves self-rated health. These positive effects are compensated, for men, by a feeling of being at a disadvantage at work and a household revenue loss caused by illness. For women, the same conclusion holds for a change of tasks or work station. Classification JEL : I10, J31, J81

The 2008 reform of special public pension regimes in France. a case study of the paris metro`/titrebWe propose a quantitative analysis of the reform of a special public pension regime, that of the Paris Metro transportation workers, which took place at the end of 2007 and became effective in 2008. We focus on the case of train drivers. To assess the reform, we advocate the use of a criterion: the expected present real net cost, per year of service, which is the expected, discounted sum of net real wages and pension benefits earned by a worker over his entire life cycle, to take`np pagenum="II"/b the social cost of public pensions into account. The provisions introduced by the reform should save some public funds, once the permanent regime is reached, but in the long run. Before the permanent regime is reached, a long transitory period will hold and lead to an increase in the public costs. This transitory regime is likely to end up with larger State subsidies to the special pension scheme. The reform can be interpreted as a deal between the public authorities and the insiders at the expense of the new recruits. The “right” to reform was “bought” from the unions at the cost of a substantial amount of grandfathering. Having examined the publicly available data, we argue that a reform, preserving the public budget from an outright increase in social costs could have been technically feasible and politically acceptable. Classification JEL : H55, J26, J45

Are small island developing states more economically vulnerable than other developing countries ? This paper proposes a robust measure of economic vulnerability for developing economies. We focus on small island developing states, which are known to be highly vulnerable compared to other developing groups. We exploit the Economic Vulnerability Index (evi) developed by the United Nations Committee for Development Policy (uncdp), but we adopt an endogenous weighting system rather than the more common ad hoc weights system traditionally retained. Therefore, we apply the new multi-criteria decision approach derived from data envelopment analysis (dea) proposed by Hatefi and Torabi [2010] to the uncdp's evi for 2009 data. Implementing this approach for a set of developing countries that includes several small island states provides mixed support for the conventional finding : Although small island developing economies are obviously prone to high economic vulnerability, the magnitude of this vulnerability seems to be significantly decreased with our new index. Classification JEL : O11, O13, O53

This paper empirically examines life satisfaction in female Benedictine monasteries in Germany from the perspective of happiness research in economics. A dataset of 154 Benedictine nuns is analyzed. The main objective is to identify the most important determinants of happiness and to empirically evaluate the hypothesis that these nuns have very high subjective satisfaction with life. The impact of various aspects (such as age, health, religiosity, motivation and fulfillment of basic psychological needs) on life satisfaction is discussed. The fact that Benedictines are satisfied with their lives might help explain why this organization was remarkably successful in the past and why many monasteries managed to survive on the market for many centuries.

Relying on a structural nonparametric estimation, we show that co2 emissions clearly increase with income at low income levels. For higher income levels, we observe a decreasing relationship, though not significant. We also find that co2 emissions monotonically increases with energy use at a decreasing rate.