This article aims to analyse gender wage differentials in Spain by taking into account the levels of educational attainment and by studying whether the educational mismatch affects the gender wage gap. Focusing on returns to education, evidence is found on the existence of educational mismatch and on its contribution to determine wages, with women suffering greater wage penalties that are associated with educational mismatch. Furthermore, although the gender wage gap is lower for individuals with low educational levels, we find that the part of this gap due to differences in returns is greater in this group. On the contrary, the gender gap is greater among highly-educated workers, but in this case most of the wage differentials are due to differences in productive characteristics. In any case, our results suggest that gender wage discrimination tends to be greater for those workers who show educational mismatch.

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The article examines relative wages of immigrants in Spain, with a particular focus on the impact of the Great Recession. The empirical analysis is restricted to men and is based on matched employeremployee microdata and the decomposition techniques of Juhn et al. (1991, 1993) and Fortin et al. (2011). Our results show that the significant native-immigrant wage gap that exists both in terms of average wages and of differentials along the wage distribution is essentially explained by differences in the endowments of observed characteristics so that, in general, immigrants tend to receive a similar wage treatment than Spaniards with analogous observed attributes. On the other hand, the Great Recession has had a noticeable impact on the relative wages of immigrants, given that the significant increase of the native-immigrant wage gap observed during the previous expansionary period was mitigated during the economic downturn due to composition effects arising from the severe employment destruction pattern.

This article examines the relative employment situation of female employees from a novel perspective based on the construction of multidimensional indicators of employment precariousness that allow examining its scale and nature. The evidence obtained for Spain shows that both the intensity and incidence of precarious employment are significantly higher for women, to the point that half of the women are multidimensionally precarious (with an incidence which is 40% higher than that of men) and precarious females simultaneously suffer on average from nearly three deficiencies in their jobs. Although female employment precariousness is highly persistent over time, it also exhibits significant oscillations plausibly linked to changes in the economy's cyclical position and in labour market regulations. Moreover, it exhibits a great heterogeneity by subgroups (it has even an extreme nature for certain subgroups of females) and by individuals (25% of women suffer between three and six job deficiencies, which compares with 24% of women having jobs without any type of deficiency). Finally, although the greater labour precariousness of women is largely explained by their observed characteristics, particularly by their greater presence in part-time jobs, women still have a greater probability of being precarious than observationally similar men.