Trends in inequality: A national and disaggregated earnings inequality study for Spain, 1980-2016

This article studies the evolution of Spain’s wage inequality between 1995 and 2017, emphasizing differences in trends at cohorts, sectors, and regional levels and using data of Spain’s Continues Sample of Working Histories (Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales MCVL). This dataset allows studying how broad changes in inequality are decomposed at a disaggregated level. The results suggest that wage inequality in Spain is strongly countercyclical. After the Great Recession, the earnings distribution became even more unequal, this is appreciated over all the autonomous communities, especially Andalusia, where the construction sector was relatively more important, in opposition the North of Spain has a higher percentage of the highly educated workers, and less dependent on the construction sector before the crisis. Possible explanations for the documented evolution in earnings inequality are the evolution of the unemployment rate and the development of the college wage premium.