This article reviews the similarities and differences in the transition to adulthood in Europe. Recent change and the still striking diversity in pathways to adulthood in Europe have attracted growing comparative research interests. The considerable heterogeneity in institutional arrangements, cultural heritage, and economic life observed across contemporary European societies provides fertile ground for testing hypotheses of various macro-level theories and approaches addressing interactions between micro- and macro-level factors. Pursuing a comparative perspective, this review frames the transition to adulthood within a life course perspective. After having mapped the terrain of recent change and contemporary diversity in the transition to adulthood in Europe, the review presents the theoretical perspectives predominantly used to explain diversity and discusses whether the empirical evidence squares with the theoretical propositions. The review concludes by suggesting how future research could advance understanding of the complex nature of the transition to adulthood in Europe.

Swiss secondary education is subdivided into lower and upper secondary schooling each composed of several selective tracks. Compulsory education

For the period of the 1960s to the late 1980s, this paper examines variation in job opportunities for men and women in the occupationally segmented and highly gender segregated Swiss labor market. Job opportunities are defined as the volume of job openings potentially accessible to individuals with given skills and other desired characteristics. They are conceptualized within the queuing approach, taking into account the structure and cyclical fluctuations of the Swiss labor market. Theoretical arguments about employers' criteria for ranking workers are abundant. However, the testing of the corresponding hypotheses has often been hampered due to the difficulty of measuring individual job opportunities empirically. This paper attempts to advance this research field by proposing an individual-level and timedependent measurement of job opportunities based on annual occupation-level job advertisement data. It yields an indicator of the volume of job opportunities accessible to workers with given occupationspecific credentials and other job relevant characteristics (i.e., gender, age, work experience). Based on separate regression analyses for men and women, job opportunities for salient groups of labor-market participants and their ranking within the labor queues are assessed. The findings, which differ markedly by gender, show that macro-level processes, such as the economic cycle, play an important role for men's job opportunities in particular. Furthermore, job opportunities strongly depend on occupational credentials whereas educational attainment plays a minor part. Age and cohort effects are found mainly for women. These findings imply that in occupationally segmented and sex-segregated labor markets occupational credentials and sex serve as employers' primary ranking criteria.

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