Ramseyer-Rasmusen,"Judicial Independence in Civil Law Regimes: Econometrics from Japan," 4 October 2005


This file contains links to data and computer programs for the following article: J. Mark Ramseyer and Eric Rasmusen. Judicial Independence in Civil Law Regimes: Econometrics from Japan. , Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization (1997) 13: 259- 286. Also published in Japanese as ``Judicial Independence in a Civil Law Regime: The Evidence from Japan'' in Leviathan: The Japanese Journal of Political Science (1998) 22: 116- 149 (see this page ). Judges in Japan cannot be fired if their decisions offend the government, but they follow a career path in which the location and type of positions they hold may be subject to political influence. We have obtained a comprehensive record of career assignments for judges educated after the Second World War. We couple data on judicial output (the quantity and nature of a judge's opinions) with these career records. We examine judges who began their careers 1961-65, focussing on the Class of 1965, for whom we have determined the number of pro- and anti- government decisions. If the promotion process is politicized, the marginal impact of individual politically deviant cases will decline over the course of a judge's career, since the political opinions of older judges have already become clear to the administration. This does seem to be the case in our logit regressions. In Ascii-Latex and Acrobat pdf ( http://rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen_97.JLEO.japan.pdf ).

Here are the files:

  1. The main data in STATA and Ascii with variable names in a separate file.
  2. The S138 election law data in STATA and Ascii with variable names in a separate file.
  3. The Stata command and output: the do file and the log file.

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