Person: Ramseyer, John
Loading...
Email Address
AA Acceptance Date
Birth Date
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Job Title
Last Name
Ramseyer
First Name
John
Name
Ramseyer, John
32 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 32
Publication Lowering the Bar to Raise the Bar: Licensing Difficulty and Attorney Quality in Japan(Harvard John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business, 2013) Ramseyer, John; Rasmusen, Eric BennettUnder certain circumstance, a relaxation in occupational licensing standards can increase the quality of those who enter the industry. The effect turns on the opportunity costs of preparing for the licensing examination: making the test easier can increase the quality of those passing if it lowers the opportunity costs enough to increase the number of those willing to go to the trouble of taking the test. We explore the theoretical circumstances under which this can occur and the actual effect of the relaxation of the difficulty of the bar exam in Japan from 1992 to 2011.Publication Bottom-Feeding at the Bar: Usury Law and Value-Dissipating Attorneys in Japan(Mohr Siebeck, 2013) Ramseyer, JohnCritics have long complained that lawyers dissipate value. Some do, of course. Some legal work dissipates more value than others, and the lawyers who focus on the most notorious rent-seeking sectors extract a heavy toll in the U.S. Whether lawyers choose to focus on value-dissipating or value-enhancing work depends on the institutional structure in place, and the American legal system apparently generates high returns to value-dissipating work. The Japanese legal system traditionally holds down such returns, and Japanese attorneys have invested much less in those sectors. In 2006, the Japanese Supreme Court unilaterally invented an entirely new field of rent-seeking: it construed usury law to let borrowers sue for refunds of "excessive" interest they had explicitly and knowingly -- and with statutory authorization -- agreed to pay. Although borrowers swamped the courts with refund claims, the field did not attract either experienced or talented attorneys. Instead, it attracted two groups: new lawyers who had entered the bar under the relaxed licensing standards, and the least talented lawyers. At least in this sector of the rent-seeking field, the returns to experience and talent in Japan apparently remain lower than in value-enhancing sectors of the bar.Publication Talent matters: Judicial productivity and speed in Japan(Elsevier BV, 2012) Ramseyer, JohnTo 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. The data cover 706 judges (about a third of the Japanese bench). I find: (A) Productivity correlates with apparent intellectual ability and effort. The judges who attended the most selective universities, who passed the bar exam most quickly, and who were chosen by the courts for an elite career track publish the most opinions. (B) Adjudicatory speed correlates with apparent ability and effort too, but institutional experience counts as well. As the courts acquired increasing experience with malpractice cases, the pace of adjudication quickened.Publication The Good Occupation? Law in the Allied Occupation of Japan(2009) Miwa, Yoshiro; Ramseyer, JohnThey left Japan in shambles. By the time they surrendered in 1945, Japan’s military leaders had slashed industrial production to 1930 levels. Not so with the American occupiers. By the time they left in 1952, they had rebuilt the economy and grown it by fifty percent. By 1960 the economy had tripled, and by 1970 tripled once more. For Japan’s spectacular economic recovery, the American-run Allied Occupation had apparently set the stage. The Americans had occupied, and the economy had boomed. The Americans had ruled, and Japan had thrived. At least during the Occupation’s early years, the Americans had apparently planned and run a “Good Occupation.” Or so it is often said. In fact, the Americans did nothing of the sort. When they arrived in 1945, they brought few economic plans. Rather than invent a new plan, they simply helped incumbent bureaucrats keep the legal controls they had manipulated—disastrously—throughout the War. Coming from the New Deal, many Americans brought an instinctive aversion to competitive market policies. After rehabilitating the Marxist leaders and intellectuals, the Americans let them use the legal apparatus to ideological ends. With a Socialist Premier, Japanese voters let them try. By 1948, the voters had had enough. Under the legal controls, miners did not mine. Firms did not produce. Farmers sold, if they sold at all, only on the black market. With inflation out of control and production stuck at desultory levels, conservatives struck back. They installed the quintessentially capitalist Shigeru Yoshida as Prime Minister; Yoshida promptly shut down the planning apparatus, and Japanese voters ratified the change. Inflation stopped, the economy rebounded, and Washington politicians forced their control-inclined agents in Tokyo to acquiesce. After June 1950 (after it had already started to recover), the economy enjoyed a procurement bonus from the Korean War.Publication Those Japanese Firms with Their Disdain for Shareholders: Another Fable for the Academy(1996) Kaplan, Steven N.; Ramseyer, JohnWe begin in Section II by discussing the modem theory of path dependence. In Section III, we trace the ties between that theory and the orthodox understanding of how Japanese firms behave. Then in Section IV, we report Steven Kaplan's recent empirical work on the actual behavior of Japanese firms. Finally, armed with the empirical results that contradict the orthodox view, in Section V we suggest how that view may have arisen.Publication Toward Contractual Choice in Marriage(Indiana University School of Law, 1998) Ramseyer, JohnPublication Do School Cliques Dominate Japanese Bureaucracies?: Evidence from Supreme Court Appointments(2011) Ramseyer, JohnThe Article presents a study which explores the impact of educational backgrounds on the appointment of judges in the Japanese Supreme Court. According to the author, the productivity of judges is the primary factor for the appointment in the Supreme Court. It stresses the lack of evidence to justify the favoritism toward graduates from Kyoto University and the University of Tokyo.Publication Products Liability Through Private Ordering: Notes on a Japanese Experiment(University of Pennsylvania, 1996) Ramseyer, JohnAny justification of strict products liability faces a problem: why should the law impose on private contracts made in competitive product markets what is effectively a mandatory insurance contract? Proponents of the current regime generally justify it by citing some mix of contracting costs, informational asymmetries, and (sometimes) consumer irrationality. The common implicit premise is that parties to ordinary consumer sales contracts would not, in an unregulated market, negotiate strict products liability by contract. In fact, over the past 20 years, manufacturers of a wide variety of products in Japan have voluntarily offered strict products liability protection by contract. In this article, I introduce the data on these contracts, and explore why some manufacturers (but not others) have found the contracts economically advantageous.Publication Lowering the Bar to Raise the Bar: Licensing Difficulty and Attorney Quality in Japan(Society for Japanese Studies, 2015) Ramseyer, John; Rasmusen, Eric BennettUnder certain circumstance, a relaxation in occupational licensing standards can increase the quality of those who enter the industry. The effect turns on the opportunity costs of preparing for the licensing examination: making the test easier can increase the quality of those passing if it lowers the opportunity costs enough to increase the number of those willing to go to the trouble of taking the test. We explore the theoretical circumstances under which this can occur and the actual effect of the relaxation of the difficulty of the bar exam in Japan from 1992 to 2011.Publication Law and Economics in Japan(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, College of Law, 2011) Ramseyer, JohnAlthough law & economics scholarship has grown rapidly in recent years, Japanese scholars (with prominent exceptions, to be sure) have embraced the approach less enthusiastically than their U.S. peers. I explore some "reasons" for this reticence -- particularly, the location of legal education in the undergraduate curriculum, and the long-term Marxist domination of economics faculties. Ultimately, these "explanations" remain unsatisfactory. The undergraduate location of law does not explain law & economics' reception across a broader sample of countries, or why universities keep law in these undergraduate departments in the first place. And Marxist dominance is not the cause of an intellectual outcome. Instead, it is itself an intellectual outcome. At root, the reason for the difficulty in explaining patterns of intellectual diffusion lies in the paucity of hard-edged incentives in higher education. Although universities compete, they do not compete with anything approaching the intensity of for-profit firms. As a result, the mechanisms behind the equilibrium outcomes we observe in economic markets simply do not apply in education. Lacking those mechanisms, universities might still converge on superior intellectual approaches. Or they might not.