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...

This report provides quantitative and qualitative measures of the impact of same-sex marriage on Hawai'i's economy and government. We find that marriage equality is likely to lead to substantial increases in visitor arrivals, visitor spending, and state and county general excise tax revenues. We...

We use dynamic panel data regressions to investigate whether the strength of a country’s patent protection for pharmaceuticals is associated with more pharmaceutical patenting by its residents and corporations in the United States. Using the Pharmaceutical Intellectual Property Protection...

Social scientists argue that post-World War II land reforms in East Asia were critical ingredients in the region’s strong economic growth, but pay little attention to how large-scale land confiscations might affect the security of property rights in each country. A review of the history...

In match-play sports, the best players seem to be both versatile and unpredictable in their use of techniques during play. Our analysis extends empirical work on player versatility and unpredictability to the Japanese sport of sumo wrestling. While earlier studies of tennis serves and football...

Building on the seminal work of Ginarte and Park (1997), we develop an index of property rights in pharmaceutical innovations, the Pharmaceutical Intellectual Property Protection (PIPP) Index, for 154 countries spanning 1960 to 2005. It incorporates 5 types of property rights in pharmaceuticals;...

This report provides an update on the potential impact of marriage equality in Hawai'i on the state’s economy in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent DOMA and Proposition 8 decisions. We find that marriage equality is likely to lead to substantial increases in Hawai'i visitor...

This paper examines a puzzle regarding public land privatization in New South Wales and the Province of Buenos Aires in the early nineteenth century. Both claimed frontier lands as public lands to raise revenue. New South Wales lost control of the public claim as squatters rushed out and claimed...

During the early 1960s a few of Hawaii’s public high schools began to offer economics courses, and they gradually became popular social studies electives. By 1999, over 46% of public high school seniors completed a one-semester course in economics. From this peak, enrollment rates would...