This paper shows how the productive efficiency of Japanese public halls has changed following the introduction of the Designated Manager System (DMS), which was introduced around 2006. It is predicted that the DMS has forced the managers of public halls to be more cost conscious. That is, the frontier production function for public halls is expected to shift outwards, and inefficiencies would be smaller after the introduction of the DMS. The results of frontier analysis suggest that the DMS led to an upward shift of the production frontier, but it did not lead to any large changes in the efficiency.