Although the executive branch appoints Japanese Supreme Court justices as it does in the United States, a personnel office under the control of the Supreme Court rotates lower court Japanese judges through a variety of posts. This creates the possibility that politicians might indirectly use the...

Antitrust scholars have come to accept the basic ideas about exclusive dealing that Bork articulated in The Antitrust Paradox. Indeed, they have even extended his list of reasons why exclusive dealing can promote economic efficiency. Yet they have also taken up his challenge to explain how...

Under certain circumstance, a relaxation in occupational licensing standards can increase the quality of those who enter the industry. The effect turns on the opportunity costs of preparing for the licensing examination: making the test easier can increase the quality of those passing if it...

Using micro-level data on attorney incomes, we reconstruct the industrial organization of the Japanese legal services industry. These data suggest a bifurcated bar, with two sources of unusually high income: an idiosyncratic return to talent in Tokyo, and a compensating differential for the lack...

Most studies of executive compensation have data on pay but not total income. Because exchange-listed Japanese firms (unlike exchange-listed U.S. firms) need not disclose executive compensation figures in their securities filings, most studies on Japan lack even good data on pay. Through 2004,...

Everyone realizes the importance of social norms as guides to behavior and substitutes or complements for law. Coming up with a paradigm for analyzing norms, however, has been surprisingly difficult, as has systematic empirical study. In this chapter of the Handbook of Law and Economics, edited...

Countries have different comparative advantages in quality. These might be due to technological differences, or to reputation differences of the sort described in Klein & Leffler (1981). Reputation differences are particularly interesting, since good reputations are a form of “social...

Is it better to move first, or second— to innovate, or to imitate? We look at this in a context with both asymmetric information and payoff externalities. Suppose two players, one with superior information about market quality, consider entering one of two new markets immediately or waiting...

If there is competition for access to an underpriced good such as a free parking spot, the competition can eat up the entire surplus, eliminating the social value of the good. There is a discontinuity in social welfare between “enough” and “not enough,” with the minimum social welfare...

Is it better to move first, or second— to innovate, or to imitate? We look at this in a context with both asymmetric information and payoff externalities. Suppose two players, one with superior information about market quality, consider entering one of two new markets immediately or waiting...