Paper incoming. Slides here.
Abstract: Japan has built one of the OECD’s more generous parental-leave systems, yet motherhood still marks a major rupture in women’s employment. Using long-running household panel data, I show that the interruption itself is widespread, but its consequences are not. Women in regular and non-regular jobs are similarly likely to stop working around childbirth; they differ sharply in whether they still have a job to return to. For most regular workers, childbirth takes the form of a temporary absence within an ongoing employment relationship; for many non-regular workers, it ends that relationship. Leave entitlements are exercised through an employment relationship, so they protect best those whose relationship is built to survive an absence. The employment consequences of motherhood in Japan are therefore shaped by where women stand in the labour market before they become mothers, as much as by what policy formally guarantees. Where job security and career progression attach to one type of contract, childbirth turns pre-existing labour-market divisions into lasting differences in women’s employment trajectories.
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.