no abstract available.

We explore the rationale behind and the mechanisms employed by French judges while discharging personal debts in exchange for liquidation of debtors' assets. Our empirical results highlight the determinants of judicial selection between debtors whose debts are wiped out and those who have to...

There is extensive literature on whether courts or legislators produce efficient rules, but which of them produces rules efficiently? The law is subject touncertainty ex ante; uncertainty makes the outcomes of trials difficult to predict and deters parties from settling disputes out of court. In...

We provide a comparison of the adversarial and inquisitorial trial procedures. We find that social costs associated with a given level of justice are always smaller under the adversarial rule. Nevertheless, the inquisitorial rule may be better because it allows for state control of all the...

no abstract available.