In 1976 Japan expanded the scope of its patent law by extending coverage to newly-developed chemical and pharmaceutical products. Previously the patent law had only provided protection to new production processes for manufacturing chemicals and pharmaceuticals. We use rate of return data from...

This paper investigates local government consolidations with a focus on public choice aspects in the decision-making. Politicians could lose future payoffs if their locality merges with a larger counterpart, and they may sabotage the merger process. The analysis with data from 3,212 Japanese...

This paper investigates the bankruptcy of Aloha Airlines and its exit from Hawaii’s interisland passenger market in order to examine whether government intervention is warranted based on the presumed benefits to the general public. A regression analysis of interisland traffic volume does not...

Economists have debated whether and why the designated hitter (DH) rule in North American major league baseball led to an increase in hit-batsmen. We use data from Japan's professional baseball leagues, the Pacific League (DH rule) and the Central League (no DH rule), to re-examine this...

We examine the 1965 change from an open-bidding to a draft system for new players in Japan's professional baseball leagues. Our theoretical analysis, which incorporates two factors commonly observed in professional sports, imperfect information on new recruits and outlier, highly skilled...

Teams in Japan’s two professional baseball leagues began to add foreign players to their rosters in the early 1950s, with the average number of foreign players per team reaching 5.79 in 2004. One reason for their increased use of foreign players was that foreign hitters substantially...

Out analysis focuses on the effect of U.S. government pressure on Korea to adopt product patents for chemical and pharmaceutical products. American pressure began in November 1985 and ended with the Korean Legislature's passage of a new patent law in December 1986. We conduct an event study of...

Japan's slow growth in the 1990s has raised concerns that Japanese political and economic institutions are not responding effectively to domestic problems and increased global competition. But Japan's stagnant macroeconomic performance masks structural changes and economic reforms now underway....

Cook's contact with Hawaii in 1778 initiated a tragic decline in the Hawaiian population and sweeping changes in social, economic, and political institutions prompted by Hawaii's integration with the outside world. Increasing economic integration after 1860 with the United States, Hawaii's main...

Chin Hee Hahn and Sukha Shin (2007) have developed new decompositions of Korean economic growth from 1990 to 2004. They find that Korea’s declining GDP growth has been accompanied by a sharp decline in capital deepening and an increase in total factor productivity. By contrast, Jorgenson and...