Sharing a damage that has been caused by several individuals is a difficult problem that courts often face. Even if there exist basic principles and rules to apportion damages among them (like for instance in the third Restatement of Torts promulgated in May 1999 for the United-States), legal scholars are still looking for a systematic method. Many examples of such litigation come to mind: a car driver hurts a pedestrian and breaks his or her leg. Then, the victim is taken to a hospital to be looked after but, because of the fault of the surgeon, he or she completely loses the use of his or her leg and gets amputated. Apportionment rule is needed to correctly share the damage paid by each tortfeasors. Such litigations occur as soon as two or more individuals have jointly caused damages and it is easy to think about the different fields of law concerned by this issue: environmental law and nuisance, accident law, medical malpractices, products liability, victim contributions, securities law, antitrust etc. The aim of the paper is to reconsider the issue of apportionment among multiple tortfeasors to expose some economic principles which could be applied by the judiciary in order to rationally share the damages due by each tortfeasor. But contrary to many models in law and economics, we do not use a non-cooperative game approach. In the following, damage is modeled as a cooperative game where different agents – the tortfeasors – jointly create an indivisible economic loss, the damage. The DAMAGE project aims at showing how the cooperative approach may bring useful insights into legal questions. The main issue we address in this project is the following. We use cooperative game approach as a model to evaluate the causal role of each tortfeasor. Our aim is to build a set of structured games which fit with the main cases of multiple causation (successive injury, victim’s fault, joint damage etc.) and to solve these games with usual solution concepts used in cooperative game theory. Then we will study the consequences of such apportion rules on the incentives followed by the tortfeasors. This main issue leads to two others issues. The first one is to know whether cooperative game approach is consistent with contemporary counterfactual theories of causation. The second one is to study whether the French jurisdictions practices (mainly civil courts) are enlightened by our approach. We will proceed to an empirical study by building an original data set on the main French courts decisions on this topic. And this date base will finally be open to legal scholars, judges and lawyers.

For a long time the indissoluble nature of marriage and the gender distribution of social roles was met by payment of (lifetime) alimony after the divorce : the man had to provide an income for his ex-wife, independently of the amounts paid for bringing up their shared children. In France, this legal model was partially abandoned in 1975 with the setting up of a “compensatory allowance”. This meant, instead of a paying a maintenance allowance, making a payment of capital which was supposed to compensate for the disparity in standards of living at the time of separation and for the foreseeable future. This law did not however put an end to lifetime allowances and it was followed by a series of reforms aimed at both encouraging capital payments and limiting the accepted amounts. This movement is evidence of the idea of formal equality between spouses and strengthens the principle of a “single settlement” at the time of the divorce. The time of “unmarriage” is now established, but not that of the equality of the sexes : in parallel with greater participation of women in the employment market and the decline in the fertility rate, we know that investment in domestic activities and the children’s upbringing, the advancement of both professional careers and incomes for men and women remain very different. However, whilst the social conditions for its payment seem still to exist, a compensatory allowance is rarely claimed during divorce proceedings and only 12.5% of divorce decisions include one, in parallel with a constant decrease in the amounts granted. Moreover, the criteria for decision given to judges by the Civil Code remain ambiguous and still fluctuate between the principle of alimony (ensuring the ex-wife minimum resources) and that of compensation or benefit (compensating for the wife’s loss of earnings linked to her domestic investment to the detriment of her professional investment). Consequently, it is not possible from the decisions rendered to understand the principles determining the amount of compensatory allowances. We therefore seek to know the determinants for the judge in allocating an amount, and in particular, whether or not they are linked to the existence of such inequality in the couple, given that practitioners are starting to use “scales” whose criteria remain implicit. Bringing together researchers in law, economics and sociology with practitioners (judges, lawyers), this project aims to investigate the theoretical, empirical and political basis of the payment of such an allowance. It further proposes to scientifically analyse how the practitioners (lawyers, trial court judges, appellate court judges) confront contradictions and ambiguities when they have to make a decision granting and fixing the amount of a compensatory allowance. Finally, from the findings of the preceding analyses, the project’s ambition is to design a decision-making tool to assist in fixing the amount of a compensatory allowance (scale) which can be proposed to the Ministry of Justice.

Although France and Germany are similar in many socio-economic dimensions, their total fertility rates are at the opposite extremes of the spectrum found in the OECD. German family policy has sought to increase the low rate for years with little success. We believe that much can be learned from a systematic comparison that is guided by economic theory, features detailed modeling of family policy and labor market environments alike, and adequately controls for heterogeneity in preferences. In the proposed project, we develop an estimable life cycle model with endogenous fertility, career, and labor supply decisions. The model is fully forward-looking, so women choose their careers based on their desired fertility level and the costs of career breaks. These costs are shaped by policy through the prices of childcare, maternity leave benefits, and birth-related job protection policies. They are also influenced by the choice of career itself: Foregone returns to experience and human capital depreciation vary with the task baskets associated with different types of jobs. Our model includes the decision to obtain a university degree; in order to get a meaningful distinction between different career paths we develop a task based approach. Heterogeneous preferences for education, work and fertility ensure that we do not falsely attribute differences in outcomes to variation in the institutional setting. We perform extensive model checks, including validation on holdout samples. Estimating comparable versions of the model for Germany and France allows us to decompose differences in outcomes into differences in policy, the labor market environment, and preferences. We are also able to investigate possible interaction effects between these three sets of explanatory factors. We also use the model to study specific family policy measures in greater detail. Our main application will be the 2007 reform of parental leave benefits in Germany. Unlike the existing quasi-experimental studies, the structural model will allow us to quantify the separate effects of the different components of the reform, to isolate the reform effects from concomitant changes such as the expansion of childcare, and to predict the long-run fertility effects of the reform, distinguishing changes in completed fertility from pure timing effects. We will also use the model to simulate changes to the current system of parental leave regulations and to approximate the efficient frontier of fertility and female labor force participation, while leaving total fiscal cost constant at the present level.

Economists, as well as policy-makers, agree nowadays that university-generated knowledge contributes decisively to the economic growth of nations and local economies. The Bayh-Dole Act introduced in the US in the early 80's, was the key policy initiative aimed at encouraging the commercialization of academic research results. Many observers suggest that the recent technological success of the USA owes a lot to this new “commercial model” of university technology transfer. Similar reforms have now been initiated in many advanced countries and most research universities and public research organizations have set up technology transfer offices (TTOs) which commercialize academic knowledge and manage the rights. France in particular, has adopted a series of policy reforms progressively introducing this new model, aiming at improving the social and economic returns of academic research. We show in this proposal, thanks to a first investigation of the French data that we intend to expand and reliabilize in this project, that if public patenting has significantly raised in the last decade (up to 14% of all patent families in 2012), it is mainly due to a sharp modification in the ownership structure of academic patents that is accompanied by a contrasted evolution of their quality indicators. These first results stress a series of interesting questions that we will address in this project. Are traditional academic incentives aligned with this new goal of contributing to technology transfer? Are the different scenarios of technology transfer associated with different levels of effectiveness, and if so, why? What are the impacts of the recent changes of the legislation and of new policy instruments on technology transfer? To answer these questions, we need to rely on a consistent micro-economic understanding of the new commercial model of university technology transfer, at the interplay between the three typical actors of the transfer: the professor (or researcher), the TTO and the company. On the empirics side, we need to rely on very recent, and very complete data. Therefore, we will match, at the professor and researcher level, individual information, patent data, publication data and project funding data. To some extent, France will be considered as a case study in itself. No such precise and complete empirical analysis has already been performed in any large industrialized country. A survey of academic inventors, interviews of TTO CEOs, as well as case studies on the Bordeaux and Strasbourg sites will complement our information when national wide data are not available. So as to contribute to the policy debate on technology transfer, we will identify the impact of policy initiatives which target only some part of the reference population and evidence the differential behavior of “treated” and their controls. We will also expand our investigations to the European level and exploit cross-country policy variations in time. Our goal is to provide robust policy recommendations to improve (tentatively optimize) university technology transfer. The team members are experts on the issue of academic patenting and technology transfer. They are spread over four sites, but many of them have already collaborated in the past. The cohesiveness of the team, including the strong reliability of the connection with the OST (as data provider) will ensure a timely execution of the project. New collaborations will also be undertaken, by matching, in this project, expertises on microeconomic theory, professional practices, applied micro-econometrics, identification techniques for observational data, and different data collection methods. The project should, in addition, significantly contribute to building a strong French research base on university technology transfer, in connection with policy makers, practitioners and students.

In France as in most developed countries, designing an efficient system of public financing for long-term care is one of the most striking challenges of the next two decades. But the deep lack of knowledge we face make the task rather uncertain. In this context, the main aim of this project is to establish some quantitative empirical evidences about how economic parameters, such as the private cost of formal home help for disabled elderly, impact their care arrangements. Getting an estimation of the price-elasticity of the demand for formal home help and of its effect on informal care will allow us to simulate the consequences of some reforms of the public financing scheme on care arrangements (quantity of home help provided by formal and informal caregivers), on the amount of public resources allocated to the elderly and on its distribution among them, according to income and disability level. Method The scarcity of econometrical research devoted to the impact of the cost of care in ageing economics is mainly due to the difficulty to collect precise data on prices and out of pocket expenditures, since, in many countries, this field of public policy is decentralized: the way public benefits are calculated thus differs according to the geographical location of the claimant. The French minister for health and social affairs will produce next year a specific survey, called CARE, which will include all the information needed to estimate our parameters of interest with standard econometric strategies, but will not be renewed afterwards. We thus propose, first, to use this survey to estimate the impact of private cost of formal help on care arrangement with standard models and methods and, second, to use the results as a benchmark for original alternative strategies, which require less specific data but rely on more sophisticated methods (partial identification) and take advantage on a precise knowledge of the decentralized rules of public financing. These alternative strategies will be implemented with administrative surveys used routinely for the follow-up of APA beneficiaries, the Handicap-Santé survey, which is renew every ten years, and a specific survey, called "Territories", conducted by our research team in 2012, in which we collected information from 73 metropolitan Conseils généraux on their practices regarding home services price-setting and demand subsidization. This gives to the project a methodological dimension since we will be able to evaluate estimation strategies, which could be usefull for analysing other fields of decentralized public policies. Working program Three alternative strategies will be implemented in the first part of the project : 1/ Estimating the price-elasticity of the demand for formal home help, using data of one specific department: in this case, the Territoires survey allows us to calculate the exact private cost of one hour of home help for APA beneficiaries cared by a service whose price was set by the local government. We already have the result for one département and will work on another one to test the robustness of our results. 2/ Estimating the price-elasticity of the demand for formal home help, using a sample of APA beneficiary gathered by the Health minister across 66 départements and partial identification methods : in this case, information is too poor to calculate the exact individual private cost, but the Territoires survey will allow us to establish a range of cost for each department. 3/ Estimating the impact of the amount of formal home help on informal care, through a bivariate model, using the Handicap Santé Survey. The Territoires survey will in this case offer proper instruments for the amount of formal home help in order to deal with the simultaneity of decisions regarding formal and informal care. In the second part of the project, we will use our estimation results to build a simulation model and analyze the impact of various reforms of price-setting and subsidization.