Les questions de légitimité et de stabilité des systèmes politiques ont longtemps été étudiées séparément des problèmes de mise en oeuvre du droit en sciences économiques. L’objectif de cette thèse est concilier ces différentes approches afin de replacer la mise en oeuvre de la norme juridique au centre du débat institutionnel. Ce travail se décompose en cinq investigations empiriques ou expérimentales portant chacune sur une des étapes du processus politique et judiciaire.Le premier article s’intéresse à l’impact des droits constitutionnels sur les dépenses publiques. La seconde étude explore l’influence des biais d’auto-complaisance sur la demande et l’offre de redistribution. Le troisième travail analyse les décisions rendues par le Conseil Constitutionnel. La quatrième partie examine la réforme de la carte judiciaire des Conseils de Prud’hommes de 2008. Le dernier chapitre étudie la relation entre la composition syndicale des Conseils de Prud’hommes et les issues des litiges qui y sont portés.Nos analyses reposent sur les outils économétriques et expérimentaux. Elles font usage de méthodes d’estimations classiques (OLS, GLS, Probit, Logit, Within OLS), de modèles à sélection (Heckman, Triprobit), des outils destinés aux problèmes d’endogénéité (2SLS)et des techniques d’estimation de systèmes d’équation (3SLS). L’approche expérimentale contient également des tests statistiques communément appliqués (tests de permutation,tests de comparaison de moyenne, tests de proportion) ainsi que de récentes méthodes pour traiter l’hétérogénéité (wild clustering). / The legitimacy and the stability of political systems have very often been studied in economics separate from considerations about legal norms’ enforcement. My objective is to combine these different approaches, and to place the question of the legal enforcement at the heart of the debate about institutions. This work is made of cinq empirical and experimental investigations that deal with each of the stages of the political and legal process.This first paper analyzes the impact of constitutional rights on public expenditures. The second article explores the influence of self-serving biases on the demand and the supplyof redistribution. The third analysis focuses on the decisions of the French Constitutional Council. The fourth work deals with the recent reform of the judiciary map of Frenchlabor courts. The last study investigates the relationship between the composition of the elected jurors in French labor courts and the way cases are terminated.Our investigations rely on econometric and experimental techniques. They use standard estimation methods (OLS, GLS, Probit, Logit, Within OLS), selection models (Heckman,Triprotibt), techniques for endogeneity correction (2SLS), and methods to estimate systems of equations (3SLS). The experimental analysis makes use of standard statistical tests(permutation tests, proportion tests, two-group mean-comparison tests), and more recent methods to solve heterogeneity (wild clustering).

This thesis investigates different social and political aspects of modern economies. The first chapter contributes to the natural resource curse debate, by showing that the impact of resource windfalls is different among democracies and autocracies. The results also point to the existence of a large heterogeneity in the response to resource shocks among autocracies. The second chapter focuses on metropolitan areas in the US, and deals with the issue of social capital formation. I examine one important aspect of social capital, trust, and argue that it is lower when income inequality between different racial groups in the metropolitan area is higher. The third chapter studies the relation between media influence and electoral voting in Italy. I relate electoral outcomes at the municipal level to differences in signal reception of Silvio Berlusconi's private TV network. The results show that greater exposure to commercial television increases support for Silvio Berlusconi's party. / Aquesta tesi investiga diferents aspectes socials i polítics de les economies modernes. El primer capítol versa sobre el debat a l'entorn dels recursos naturals, mostrant que l'impacte dels guanys imprevistos dels recursos és diferent entre democràcies i autocràcies. Els resultats també indiquen l'existència d'una àmplia heterogeneïtat entre autocràcies en la seva reacció davant a variacions dels recursos. El segon capítol se centra en les àrees metropolitanes dels EUA i tracta el tema de la formació de capital social. He examinat un aspecte important del capital social, la confiança, i, argumento que és baixa quan, en la mateixa zona metropolitana, hi ha una gran desigualtat en les rentes dels diferents grups racials. El tercer capítol estudia la relació entre la influència dels mitjans de comunicació i el vot electoral a Itàlia. He relacionat els resultats electorals a nivell municipal amb les diferències en la recepció del senyal dels canals privats de televisió de Silvio Berlusconi. El resultat mostra que una gran exposició a la televisió comercial incrementa el suport polític al partit de Berlusconi.

This thesis examines the measurement, applications and properties of consumer inflation expectations in the context of eight European Union countries: France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. The data proceed mainly from the European Commission's Consumer Survey and are qualitative in nature, therefore requiring quantification prior to use. This study first seeks to determine the optimal quantification methodology among a set of approaches spanning three traditions, associated with Carlson-Parkin (1975), Pesaran (1984) and Seitz (1988). The success of a quantification methodology is assessed on the basis of its ability to match quantitative expectations data and on its behaviour in an important economic application, namely the modelling of wages for our sample countries. The wage equation developed here draws on the theoretical background of the staggered contracts and the wage bargaining literature, and controls carefully for inflation expectations and institutional variables. The Carlson-Parkin variation proposed in Curto Millet (2004) was found to be the most satisfactory. This being established, the wage equations are used to test the hypothesis that the advent of EMU generated an increase in labour market flexibility, which would be reflected in structural breaks. The hypothesis is essentially rejected. Finally, the properties of inflation expectations and perceptions themselves are examined, especially in the context of EMU. Both the rational expectations and rational perceptions hypotheses are rejected. Popular expectations mechanisms, such as the "rule-of-thumb" model or Akerlof et al.'s (2000) "near-rationality hypothesis" are similarly unsupported. On the other hand, evidence is found for the transmission of expert forecasts to consumer expectations in the case of the UK, as in Carroll's (2003) model. The distribution of consumer expectations and perceptions is also considered, showing a tendency for gradual (as in Mankiw and Reis, 2002) but non-rational adjustment. Expectations formation is further shown to have important qualitative features.