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The potential benefits of increased international experience abound, ranging from enriching cultural understanding to an improvement of language skills and intercultural competence. At the same time, empirical evidence is mixed, particularly with regards to how well international experience translates into individual returns on the labour market. This article examines the association between studying abroad and early labour market outcomes in a comparative perspective aiming to shed light on why labour market returns differ across countries. We expect labour market returns to vary with specific country characteristics such as demand for international experience and competition among graduates at labour market entry. In our empirical analyses, we use data from 13 European countries that provide information on graduates’ early labour market outcomes. We find a large variation in the impact of studying abroad on both wages and attaining a higher service class position. Generally, the labour market returns to international experience are larger in countries in Eastern and Southern Europe with poorer university quality, higher graduate unemployment, and fewer students abroad.

Previous research suggests that household tasks prohibit women from unfolding their full earning potential by depleting their work effort and limiting their time flexibility. The present study investigated whether this relationship can explain the wage gap between mothers and nonmothers in West Germany. The empirical analysis applied fixed-effects models and used self-reported information on time use and earnings as well as monthly family and work histories from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1985-2007Wagner, Frick, & Schupp, 2007). The findings revealed that variation in reported time spent on child care and housework on a typical weekday explains part of the motherhood wage penalty, in particular for mothers of very young children. Furthermore, housework time incurred a significant wage penalty, but only for mothers. The authors concluded that policies designed to lighten women's domestic workload may aid mothers in following rewarding careers.The wage penalty for motherhood-that is, the negative effect of having children on

Modernization theorists’ ‘rising tide hypothesis’ predicted the continuous spread of egalitarian gender ideologies across the globe. We revisit this assumption by studying reunified Germany, a country that did not follow a strict modernization pathway. The socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) actively fostered female employment and systematically promoted egalitarian ideologies before reunification with West Germany and the resulting incorporation into a conservative welfare state and market economy. Based on nationally representative, pooled cross-sectional data from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) from 1991 to 2016, we apply variance function regression to examine the impact of German reunification—akin to a natural experiment—on the average levels and dispersion of gender ideology. The results show: (i) East German cohorts socialized after reunification hold less egalitarian ideologies than cohorts socialized in the GDR, disrupting the rising tide. (ii) East German cohorts hold more egalitarian ideologies than West German cohorts, but the East-West gap is less pronounced for post-reunification cohorts. (iii) Cohorts in East Germany show higher conformity with gender ideology than their counterparts in West Germany; yet conformity did not change after reunification. (iv) Younger cohorts in West Germany show higher conformity with gender ideology than older cohorts.

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