Depuis l’éclatement en 2008 de la crise immobilière internationale, les marchés des différents pays ont connu des parcours fort dissemblables. Quels enseignements faut-il en tirer dans la définition des politiques ?

Universities present some similarities with professional partnerships in law and accounting. Universities are close to being partnerships in a non-profit environment. In particular, the practice of co-option for the appointment of new teachers is similar to partnership rules according to which a new partner cannot be appointed without the consent of all the other partners. We compare co-option with other recruitment procedures such as delegation of recruitment to headhunters or the sale of academic positions at auction. Asymmetries of information, reputation, joint production of teaching and research and externalities in academic production, explain that co-option is the commonly adopted way of hiring new faculty. Still, the incentives to recruit the best candidate are weakened by free-riding, moral hazard, and the fact that academics do not invest their own wealth in the university. We explore some ways of realigning incentives to recruit good candidates in the framework of a collective co-option procedure in French universities. We end up by concluding that the key factor to improve the situation lies in the institution of the university president, who should be chosen to be more independent from the academic senate. Classification JEL : I23, J54, D82, M51

The modern formulation of equality of opportunity emerges from discussions in political philosophy from the second half of the twentieth century beginning with Rawls (1971) and and . Equality of opportunity exists when policies compensate individuals with disadvantageous circumstances so that outcomes experienced by a population depend only on factors for which persons can be considered to be responsible. Importantly, inequality of opportunity for income exists when individuals’ incomes are in some important part determined by the educational achievement and income of the families that raised them. We review the philosophical debates referred to, commenting upon them from an economist's viewpoint. We propose several ways of modeling equality (or inequality) of opportunity, pointing out that an equal-opportunity ethic implies a non-welfarist way of ranking social outcomes. We propose that economic development should be conceived of as the equalization of opportunities for income in a country. We consider equalization of opportunity from a dynamic viewpoint, and we review popular attitudes with regard to distributive justice, showing that there is substantial popular support for an equal-opportunity ethic. We discuss the empirical issues that emerge in measuring inequality of opportunity and provide a review of the empirical literature that measures degrees of inequality of opportunity for the achievement of various objectives, in various countries.