How the law and the social norm interact with each other in the legalized modern society, whether the law completely replaces the pre-existing social norm or they coexist, and whether their interaction achieves an efficient system of social rules or there is innate inefficiency, have remained...

This article considers the problem of socially efficient liability rules for firms in contestable markets where natural monopoly prevails due to decreasing average cost. If the fixed cost that pushes the entry-limiting price above marginal cost is large relative to the level of external harm of...

This article takes up three representative arguments that regard Japanese bureaucracy as superior, harmful, or benign for the Japanese economy and supports the view that the Japanese bureaucracy cannot behave independently from the intentions of politicians. But the effect of Japanese...

Harold Hotelling's celebrated theorem on the optimality of marginal cost pricing was criticized first by Frisch and later by Silberberg on the grounds that he did not use the marginal cost pricing condition in his original proof and hence that it did not constitute a valid proof. This note...

This paper derives formulae that show the marginal benefits of public inputs in second-best economies with tax distortions. The values of the change in the aggregate net output vector (and in some cases the change of profit income) evaluated at appropriate shadow prices show their marginal...