Economic arrangements, Ramseyer writes, are structured and implemented with the intent and hope that they will be carried out with 'care, intelligence, discretion, and effort'. Yet entrepreneurs work with partial information about the products, and people, they are dealing with. 'Contracting in...

Medieval Japanese governments only haphazardly enforced claims to scarce resources. Necessarily, this presented landholders with a void. To obtain the enforcement they needed, many turned to institutions affiliated with the fractious Buddhist faith instead. Temples and monasteries enjoyed an...

To study the determinants of judicial productivity and speed (measured by published opinions), I examine all 348 trial-court civil medical malpractice opinions published in Japan between 1995 and 2004. For comparative purposes, I add 120 randomly selected civil judgments from the same period....