Main description: Analyzing the motivating forces behind the trend toward Japanese direct overseas production, this work examines the appreciation of the yen, rising labor and energy costs, environmental decay, shortages of industrial sites, and critical dependence on overseas resources as...

Are litigation rates higher where social capital is low? Using prefecture-level data, I ask whether Japanese in communities with high levels of "social capital" more readily settle their divorce and traffic accident disputes out-of-court. Although litigation rate studies often measure suits per...

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...

Using micro-level data on attorney incomes in 2004, we reconstruct the industrial organization of the Japanese legal services industry. These data suggest a somewhat bifurcated bar, with two sources of unusually high income: talent in Tokyo, and scarcity elsewhere. The most talented would-be...