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This article explores the unintended gendered consequences of employment protection and vocational training systems. It develops a micrologic of skill investment by workers and employers to identify the mechanism by which specific skills become disadvantageous for women. The central claim of the article is that institutions that encourage male investment in specific skills exacerbate occupational sex segregation. The article finds that coordinated market economies, because of their robust institutional protection of male skill investments, are generally more sex segregating than are liberal market economies. The empirical section provides cross-sectional analyses of advanced industrial countries.

This article argues that the political drama surrounding Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro is a direct result of the political reforms implemented in Japan during the last decade. The new rules of the game have produced a structural force pushing Japan to resemble a Westminster system.

This article investigates the intersection of care and migration regimes by comparing four carefully matched familialist countries—Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Spain. These four countries, while sharing a similar familialist culture and welfare regime, responded to the problem of eldercare deficits differently in the 1990s and the 2000s. Italy and Spain developed a 'migrant-in-the-family model,' relying heavily on informal eldercare provided by migrant workers whom Italians colloquially call badante. Korea and Japan, by contrast, relied more on marriage migrants, with Korea developing its own variant of the migrant-in-the-family model where the migrant is typically the daughter-in-law. In Japan, some marriage migrants became care workers in the formal eldercare sector. By tracing the historical trajectories of female migration to these four countries, the article identifies a recursive relationship between migration regimes and care regimes. Initial differences in migration regimes shaped the female migratory pathways in specific ways, which, in turn, affected the development of distinctive eldercare regimes. Once these new care regimes emerged, however, they influenced the migration regime in the next cycle. The article contributes to the literatures on the intersection of care and migration regimes by untangling the reciprocal feedback processes between these two systems.

This article investigates the politics of 'defamilialization of care' in four familialist countries – Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain – during the past 15 years. By 'defamilialization of care', we refer to those public policies, which aim at reducing the care responsibility of the family – both for the young and the old. We build upon the existing literature on new social risks by highlighting the role of those macro-political institutions such as electoral systems and government types in order to demonstrate that there are two very different types of politics of defamilialization: (1) election-oriented and (2) problem-oriented. We attribute different policy outcomes in the four familialist countries to their specific institutional configurations rather than to partisan government composition or different cultural orientations.

This article investigates the politics of 'defamilialization of care' in four familialist countries – Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain – during the past 15 years. By 'defamilialization of care', we refer to those public policies, which aim at reducing the care responsibility of the family – both for the young and the old. We build upon the existing literature on new social risks by highlighting the role of those macro-political institutions such as electoral systems and government types in order to demonstrate that there are two very different types of politics of defamilialization: (1) election-oriented and (2) problem-oriented. We attribute different policy outcomes in the four familialist countries to their specific institutional configurations rather than to partisan government composition or different cultural orientations.

This paper examines the effects of public policies in shaping wives' economic standing within the family in advanced industrial societies. It conducts two types of statistical analysis. One is a multi-level regression analysis to examine the effects of employment protection regulation, the size of the public sector, tax policy, and mother-friendly social policy while controlling for individual attributes of wives (age and education) as well as household characteristics (husband's income, presence of children, and the relative educational background between the spouses). The other consists of a two-step regression analysis, whereby coefficients on personal attributes are first measured country by country, then compared across countries. Both analyses use the micro-level data from the Luxembourg Income Study for 16 advanced industrial societies. It finds that strong employment protection negatively affects women's capacity to attain economic parity vis-à-vis their husbands by reducing women's employment levels, while the size of the public sector positively affects wives' contribution to household income by improving women's wages. The positive effect of the public sector is independent of mother-friendly social policies.