The Cambridge series on the Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions is built around attempts to answer two central questions: How do institutions evolve in response to individual incentives, strategies, and choices, and how do institutions affect the performance of political and economic systems? The scope of the series is comparative and historical rather than international or specifically American, and the focus is positive rather than normative.

Property rights shape the incentive structure of a society and so determine its economic performance. In his thoughtful and provocative analysis of Japan before 1940, Mark Ramseyer argues that governments created and courts enforced legal rules that made people economically autonomous agents in many ways, providing the motive force behind economic growth. His evidence rejects oft-stated claims that Japanese courts enforced autocratic family law, for instance. But his arguments from the field of law and economics go further than this, analyzing the historical evolution of Japanese property rights in such diverse areas as land and water, children, families, factory labor, and sexual services. Many of these markets feature severe information asymmetries and thus sometimes depend more on cartelization and bargaining than on simple decentralized exchange among individuals. This magnifies the role of rules and laws in such markets in promoting economic growth. Ramseyer shows how the Imperial courts confirmed explicitly what customary practices of Tokugawa markets in land, water, and labor had conveyed implicitly, namely, secure specific rights to individuals to use factors of production under their control as they saw fit.