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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...