This study investigates how diverse parental involvement styles affect academic performance and non-cognitive skills among Japanese ninth-grade students. Using original survey data (N > 5,000) and employing Instrumental Variable and factor decomposition methods, I analyze six dimensions of involvement, including time, support, and expectations. Results show that while current involvement has limited direct effects on test scores, it significantly influences outcomes indirectly by increasing study time and enhancing non-cognitive skills. Notably, maternal monitoring negatively correlates with girls' outcomes, suggesting that excessive intervention undermines autonomy. Conversely, paternal involvement and household rules are critical for boys and disadvantaged children. Factor decomposition reveals that early childhood parenting and educational expectations possess greater explanatory power than current involvement, supporting the "self-productivity" theory. These findings suggest a shift from traditional mother-centric monitoring toward a strategic division of roles—emphasizing maternal emotional support and increased paternal engagement—to optimize adolescent development and reduce educational inequality.

This paper identifies the causal effect of teaching styles on students’ academic performance. Exploiting a unique educational setting in which teachers are randomly assigned to classes, I construct multidimensional indices of teaching styles using rich survey data. I find that a one-standard-deviation increase in a modern teaching style—characterized by a student-centered approach—raises students’ average test scores by 0.044 standard deviations. However, the impact is highly heterogeneous: while positive on average, the effect is negative for mathematics. Furthermore, the gains are largest for low-ability students, and the effect varies with teachers’ experience and educational background. Analysis of the underlying mechanisms suggests that the positive outcomes are driven by enhanced teacher–student interactions and increased teacher attention to students’ learning conditions.

I explore the origins of the positive association between socio-economic background and entrepreneurship. Using Finnish administrative data, I show that children from the top 1% of the parental income distribution are more than five times as likely to become business owners and almost three times as likely to become "real entrepreneurs" as those from the bottom 50%. Similar patterns appear when using parental wealth instead of income, though the effects are somewhat smaller in magnitude. The strongest channel behind the over-representation of entrepreneurs from high-income families is prior experience of business ownership before founding new firms. I rationalize this finding by developing an "ownership ladder'" model, where entrepreneurship is the second step on the ladder, and parental resources are associated with people stepping onto that ladder early.

Using Finnish registry data on 51,056 graduates followed annually since graduation for up to 25 years, we report three findings. First, higher EA-PGI strongly predicts income growth, but only among higher-educated people. This effect is not mediated by overall health. Second, EA-PGI does not predict income differences at labor market entry or the quality of the first employer, but rather a higher job-to-job mobility toward better-paying firms, which drives the long-run income divergence. Third, controlling for parental EA-PGI in 12,871 parent–offspring trios reduces the discounted lifetime income gap by 71 %, and the effect of paternal (but not maternal) EA-PGI on offspring income exceeds that of the offspring’s own EA-PGI. These findings suggest that genetic factors associated with educational attainment predict income trajectories primarily through faster and more frequent changes to higher-paying employers.