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...

The governance structure of public corporations is determined by the agency relationship between shareholders and managers, and the agency theory predicts that deregulation of an industry leads to governance adaptation. Deregulation of the Japanese banking business in the 1980s offers an...

Does 'competitive balances' in professional baseball improve with a change in the rules for allocating new players? Using data from Japan's two professional baseball leagues, the authors investigate how the change from an open-bidding regime to a player draft regime affected competitive balance...

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...

In 1975, Japan expanded the scope of its patent law by introducing product patents for newly developed chemical and pharmaceutical products. The authors use rate-of-return data from the Tokyo Stock Exchange for Japanese pharmaceutical companies to examine the impact of the change in the patent...

This paper introduces alternative measures of net budget allocation and legislative representation. They are neutral to the size of total expenditure and tax collection as well as to changes in the population and the size of the legislature, which makes them suitable for panel data exercises and...

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...