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...

Women can bear own children or adopt them. Extending economic theories of fertility, we provide a first theoretical treatment of the demand for adoption. We show that the propensity to adopt a child increases in the degree of own altruism, infertility, relatedness to the child, costs of own...