The authors state the Japanese government's role in creating a macroeconomic and financial environment conducive to rapid industrialization went beyond maintaining price stability. The government created a stable but segmented and tightly regulated financial system that favored the financing of...

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...

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...

All but two professional baseball leagues have adopted the “designated hitter” (DH) rule, which allows a team’s manager to designate a player to bat at the plate and run the bases in place of another player, usually the team’s pitcher. Unlike the team’s other players, the designated...