Akihiko Kawaura

Public Resource Allocation and Electoral Systems in the U.S. and Japan

This paper introduces alternative measures of net budgetallocation and legislative representation. They are neutral tothe size of total expenditure and tax collection as well as tochanges in the population and the size of the legislature,which makes them suitable for panel data exercises andinternational comparative studies. Regression analyses of 50U.S. states and 47 Japanese prefectures using these indiceshighlight similarities and differences in public resourceallocation between respective democracies that reflect theirpolitical and electoral systems.

The Designated Hitter Rule and Team Defensive Strategy in Japan's Professional Baseball Leagues

Economists have debated whether and why the designated hitter (DH) rule in North American Major League Baseball led to an increase in hit batsmen. We use data from Japans professional baseball leagues to reexamine this question. Our empirical analyses of hit batsmen for batters as well as by pitchers reveal that the DH rule resulted in increases in hit batsmen even after effects of team batting performance and pitcher quality are controlled for. We argue that the DH rule prompted changes in managerial defensive strategies, in which pitchers of poorly performing teams are instructed to engage in aggressive pitching.

Designated hitter rule debate: a search for Mr. Hyde in pitchers.

This article investigates the effect of baseball’s designated hitter rule on the number of hit batsmen, with a focus on individual pitchers. Researchers have debated the rule’s incentives for pitchers and its impact on hit batsmen based on aggregate and cross-section statistics: They treat pitchers as a group. This article argues that individual pitchers are concerned with their reputation in the baseball community, and that they do not necessarily respond to the rule change by throwing at batters. Analyses of performance data of individual pitchers in a Japanese baseball league indicate that the rule did not prompt their behavioral change.

Deregulation and governance: plight of Japanese banks in the 1990s

The governance structure of public corporations is determined by the agency relationship between shareholders and managers, and the agency theory predicts that deregulation of an industry leads to governance adaptation. Deregulation of the Japanese banking business in the 1980s offers an interesting case study in this framework, as Japanese banks fell into serious solvency problems in the post-deregulation 1990s. This paper investigates whether ineffective governance was responsible for the plight of Japanese banks. The sample is 384 corporations that were listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange between 1983 and 1990, which includes 59 banks. One of the findings is that bank shareholders allowed more diffuse ownership structure after deregulation, which demonstrates that the agency theory did not hold for shareholders of Japanese banks.

Integration of North and South American Players in Japan's Professional Baseball Leagues

Teams in Japans two professional baseball leagues began to add foreign players in the early 1950s, with the average number per team reaching 5.79 in 2004. This was primarily because foreign hitters outperformed Japanese hitters. Hazard analysis shows that a poorly performing team was more likely to hire its first Caucasian and African American players earlier than a successful team. Econometric analysis of team use of foreign players over 45 seasons (1960–2004) shows that losing Central League teams used foreign players more often in following season(s), whereas past success of Pacific League teams did not affect their use of foreign players.

The very short tenure of foreign players in Japanese professional baseball, 1951–2004

Teams in Japan’s two professional baseball leagues began to add foreign players to their rosters in the early 1950s, with the average number of foreign players per team reaching 5.79 in 2004. One reason for teams’ increased use of foreign players was that foreign hitters substantially outperformed Japanese hitters. This was due in part to binding roster caps on the number of foreign players per team. High performance was coupled with a very short tenure, with median tenure varying between one and two seasons between 1958 and 2004. We find that foreign players were hired either near the beginning or the end of their careers, with the median age of a foreign player exceeding 30 years. Our analysis shows that Japanese teams used foreign players as a “quick fix” to fill important positions in their starting line-ups. Over time, as US and Japanese markets for baseball players changed and became more integrated with others, the characteristics, tenure, and performance of foreign players in Japan also changed. We use a sample with all foreign baseball players who played one season or more in Japan to test hypotheses regarding how changes in the player market would affect baseball players’ age, tenure, and batting performance.

A tale of two duopolies: collusion and exit in a local airline industry

This article investigates two episodes of market adjustments in Hawaii’s interisland civil aviation market. One is collusion in which duopolists of similar size agreed to reduce their supply to the market. The other is unilateral exit by an individual company, which resulted in the asymmetric duopoly with respect to firm size. The analysis demonstrates that even a dominant duopolist cannot maintain sufficient market power to manipulate prices as long as competitive forces are present, while cooperative adjustment in the capacity dimension is likely to lead to higher prices on a sustainable basis. The results confirm the importance of competitive forces for mitigating price hikes in the process of adjustment.

R&D Management in Japanese Manufacturing Firms

The collapse of the ‘bubble economy’ in the early 1990s plunged Japan’s economy into an extended recession often termed the ‘lost decade’.1 In their efforts to survive the recession, Japanese companies demonstrated renewed interest in research and development (RD this emphasis on innovation is of particular relevance in today’s era of globalization, in which competition from emerging nations has become a pressing challenge in international markets. If Japanese firms are to avoid price competition from low-cost producers, they must shift their product portfolios toward innovative, high-value-added products, which in turn requires accelerating the creative and innovative dimensions of their product-development activities.