The purpose of this paper is to clarify the character of the equalized inheritance law of the French Civil Code through analyzing the trends of land ownership and agricultural production in France in the nineteenth century.
Of the studies so far made, some assume that the inheritance law of the Civil Code fulfilled the function of promoting the primitive accumulation of capital and others emphasize the farmers' tenaciousness in the inheritance custom and place the influence of the inheritance law of the Civil Code beyond consideration. As to the former, capitalism had not developed well in France and some doubts remain about such discussions. As to the latter, it is considered that the population pressure was extremely large and the land demand was also active in the agricultural villages of nineteenth-century France and it seems that under such circum-stances the inheritance law of the Civil Code assuming the equalized inheritance as a rule had a definite influence on the trends of land ownership and agricultural production, and without such considerations, it is impossible to grasp the meaning of the same law sufficiently.
Thus, in this paper, the trends of land ownership and agricultural production in those days are clarified based on the actual conditions and the meaning of the inheritance law of the Civil Code is discussed. Then, it is made clear that the inheritance law of the Civil Code promoted land ownership division and the intensification of agricultural production-especially, labor intensification; that is, the farmers were oriented toward inputting increasingly more labor so as to support themselves on the gradually divided land.

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how households' cost for searching out farmland affects the rate of abandoned land or rent in farmland markets.
In farmland transactions, households need to engage in a matching process to match idiosyncratic tastes concerning farmland such as location, farming technique, and soil conditions. This is analogous to the labor market. In the labor market, there exists frictional unemployment because of the transaction cost in the matching process. From these points, there exists a transaction cost in the farmland market and it is not appropriate to understand this market in a perfect competition framework.
In this paper, we construct a farmland rental market model in which households can move into and out of the market to search for a unit to rent. It focuses on search cost explicitly and the circular model presented by Salop is adopted to develop this model.
The main conclusions of this paper are summarized as follows. (1) In the short run, search cost and rents may move in the same direction for one case, but the rate of abandoned land has not changed. (2) In the long run, search cost, rents and the rate of abandoned land may also move in same direction. Thus, this paper indicates that the abandonment of farmland not only causes unfavorable farming conditions mainly in hilly and mountainous area, but also the presence of the externality in farmland transactions.

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