Chapter in its early stage can be viewed here. For presentation slides, click here.
Abstract: Japan has among the most generous parental leave statutes in the OECD, yet one of the widest motherhood employment gaps. Using an event-study design applied to 662 first births in the JHPS and KHPS panels (2004–2022), I show that the penalty is strongly stratified by labour-market tier. Employment falls 13.2 percentage points at childbirth, with a clean near-lead null at t = −2. Among women employed before birth, non-regular contract status predicts non-employment at t = 0 with an odds ratio of 7.50 (p < 0.001), while the binary indicator for employers with fewer than 100 employees is positive but imprecise. Post-birth “recovery” is largely an extensive-margin illusion - returning mothers shift from full-time to part-time work, and conditional hours, earnings, and implied hourly wages remain durably below pre-birth levels. Government training subsidies designed to support re-entry face a three-layer access barrier: roughly half of mothers have never heard of the programme, and among those who are aware, most report being ineligible or unsure whether they qualify, consistent with the loss of employment-insurance-linked eligibility after childbirth exit. These patterns are consistent with weaker effective access to job-continuity protections in non-regular and sub-100-employer segments; statutory entitlements alone appear insufficient where labour-market dualism channels mothers into employment tiers with limited institutional support.
Chapter in its early stage can be viewed here.
Abstract: Research on educational production functions has established that cognitive and noncognitive skills both predict student achievement, but how they combine at the margin remains less settled. Using longitudinal data from Ireland and OLS interaction models with baseline controls, I examine how attentional regulation and cognitive ability jointly predict lower-secondary school-leaving examination achievement in Maths and English. The cognition × attentional regulation interaction is negative and significant for both subjects. The marginal return to cognitive ability is substantially larger for students with weaker behavioural regulation than for those with stronger regulation. The result survives multiple-testing correction, design-effect-inflated inference, and cross-informant validation. As a contrast, I compare these results against a broader personality proxy. Under this alternative, the interaction is weak and imprecise. This suggests that conclusions about how cognitive and noncognitive skills combine depend on the behavioural content of the noncognitive measure. The results indicate that attentional regulation and cognitive ability appear to function as compensating co-inputs in predicting later academic achievement.
Chapter in its early stage can be viewed here.
Abstract: Research on gender differences in Maths achievement has documented persistent gaps, but most studies examine the gap at a single point in time and say little about whether its composition changes as children develop. This paper asks how the structure of the gender gap in Maths differs between late childhood and early adolescence. Using longitudinal data from Ireland and Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions of the same college-entrance exam outcome with predictors measured in primary school (age 9) and secondary school (age 13), I find that the gap shifts from coefficient-dominant (driven by differences in how similar skills map into outcomes) to endowment-dominant (driven by differences in measured skills themselves) across this transition: in late childhood, boys and girls have similar measured skills but those skills map differently into outcomes; by early adolescence, measured skill differences account for most of the gap. I provide an English comparison as an internal benchmark and find that the pattern reverses by subject, with girls' advantage remaining coefficient-dominant even when boys hold stronger measured endowments. Additional distributional decompositions show that average differences mask substantial concentration in the middle of the score distribution. A secondary extension examines father absence under stricter measurement and attrition constraints.