Vacancy-chain analysis (VCA), a method for tracing the flows of resources such as jobs or housing, has largely faded from scholarly attention. This is unfortunate, because VCA is often superior to markets, auctions, or games, the more popular metaphors-cum-models of resource allocation. This goal of this paper is to revive VCA by recasting it in terms of agent-based models. I first review and note the limitations of the Markov-chain version VCA (or MC-VCA), and then introduce an agent-based approach to vacancy chain systems, the ABM-VCA, which features two innovations: treating both resources/positions and opportunities as agents. I show that ABM-VCA can replicate MC-VCA (the former is an MCMC sampler of the latter) and then illustrate the usefulness of ABM-VCA to empirically study off-equilibrium dynamics by using it to assessing the impact of social revolution on the judiciary of a post-socialist country. I conclude by noting the methodological possibilities opened up by ABM-VCA, such as the potential to simulating fields and ecologies. A Python implementation of ABM-VCA is available at https://github.com/r-parvulescu/abm-vca.

Justice is a perennial topic in scholarship on Romania, from socialist legality, through transitional justice, and into anti-corruption. Systematic study of law and justice has been stymied, however, by lack of basic information: who was doing what, where, when and how? To begin addressing this shortcoming this article introduces the Romanian Judicial Professions Database, a new, open-source tool which provides yearly, person-level data on 10,000 judges, 5300 prosecutors, 3000 notaries public (notari publici), and 1000 bailiffs (executori judecătoreşti), in some cases going back to the 1970s. To illustrate the utility of these new data, I derive a series of measures which address existing findings as well as open questions in four areas of research: the communist legal system, transitional justice, anti-corruption, and social stratification. The database can be downloaded at https://osf.io/gfjke/ and supporting code at https://github.com/r-parvulescu/ro_judicial_professions.

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