Because civil-law systems hire unproven jurists into career judiciaries, many maintain elaborate incentive structures to prevent their judges from shirking. We use personnel data (backgrounds, judicial decisions, job postings) on 275 Japanese judges to explore general determinants of career...

Randolph Sloof has written a comment on the lobbying-as-signalling model in Rasmusen (1993) in which he points out an equilibrium I missed and criticizes my emphasis on a particular separating equilibrium. In this response, I discuss how to interpret multiple equilibria in games and how to...

Richard Posner suggests several arguments for increasing health care spending on males and reducing it on females in his book, Aging and Old Age . I offer a new formalization of his verbal argument.

This article addresses issues that arise in agency law when agents make contracts on behalf of principals. The main issue is whether the principal should be bound when the agent makes a contract with some third party on his behalf which the principal would immediately wish to disavow. The...

Imposing liability on a company for sexual harassment by supervisors cannot be justified as promoting equality between the sexes, protection of workers, or protection of the owners of the company. Such liability might be justified to prevent breach of contract or behavior offensive to the...

There is a secret paradox at the heart of social contract theories. Such theories assume that, because personal security and private property are at risk in a state of nature, subjects will agree to grant Leviathan a monopoly of violence. But what is to prevent Leviathan from turning on his...

The tax office wins most cases in Japan. We think about why this might be. We find that although judges who rule in favor of the taxpayer do not suffer in their future careers, if the loser-- whether governemnt or taxpayer--appeals and wins, the reversed judge's career does take a turn for the...

Conviction rates in Japan exceed 99 percent -- why? On the one hand, because Japanese prosecutors are badly understaffed they may prosecute only their strongest cases and present judges only with the most obviously guilty defendants. On the other, because Japanese judges can be reassigned by the...

Two central puzzles about social norms are how they are enforced and how they are created or modified. The sanctions for violation of a norm can be categorized as automatic, guilt, shame, informational, bilateral- costly, and multilateral-costly. Problems in creating and enforcing norms are...

We consider the learning curve in an industry with free entry and exit, and price-taking firms. A unique equilibrium exists if the fixed cost is positive. While equilibrium profits are zero, mature firms earn rents on their learning, and, if costs are convex, no firm can profitably enter after...