We have seen many cases where the factory system emerges and realizes higher productivity in the process of industrialization. However, also seen in history is that other types of production organization have kept expanding and have reached at some high performance. For instance, the putting-out...

Human tasks are often multidimensional. Holmstrom and Milgrom (1991) concluded that ghigh-poweredh incentives cannot work unless all dimensions of these tasks are observable in the firm. However, as this study shows, if the firm can observe the price vector of its products in the market,...

A sustainable fiscal state needs to have two critical factors: A stable tax base and access to an efficient bond market. The Tokugawa Shogunate had a stable land tax revenue, which was inherited to modern Japan after the Meiji restoration. Taxation, however, was restricted by the constitution...

Many human tasks are multidimensional. Hence Holmstrom and Milgrom (1991) concluded that a ghigh-poweredh incentive cannot work unless all dimensions of the task are observable in the firm. However, as this study shows, if the firm can observe the price vector of its product in the market,...

Japanese economy was losing its stability in the interwar period. Faced with the challenge, Moritaro Yamada gave an understanding that the stability of Japanese political economy before the First World War had been maintained by paternalistic institutions both of agricultural and industrial...

Even after modern economic growth began in the Western world, the international market, which consists of a number of national and regional markets, has been more or less inefficient with respect to information. To calm this inefficiency, economic institutions have taken important roles. In...

In this paper, we explore the role of the legal system in economic development, focusing on its relationship to the role of private mechanisms in contract enforcement. We use long-term prefecture-level panel data that cover the early stages of industrialization and urbanization in Japan. We...

This paper investigates determinants of geographic distribution of share tenancy and analyzes its efficiency implications in pre-war Iwate prefecture, Japan. The distribution of share tenancy was attributable to risk represented by yield variability, which in turn was affected by seasonal winds...

An intrinsic feature of a pre-modern society is in its fragmentary markets. Fragmentary markets are more likely to fail in the coordination of resource allocation. However, if a concentrated market is exogenously formed and the market could provide the only price to local markets, the market can...

Industrial clusters and factory industries co-develop during industrialization and the relational contracts between manufacturers and subcontractors are the organizational basis of clusters. We predict that relational transactions between manufacturers and subcontractors and cooperative action...