"This article studies the trend in wage discrimination in Spain from 1995 to 2002, when the third plan for equal opportunities for men and women was in action. To account for the criticism of Heckman et al. (J Hum Cap 2:1–31, 2008), we first introduce a novel approach to the analysis of wage discrimination with methods that are robust to model (mis-) specification. Following their idea, we apply semiparametric methods for the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of wage differentials between men and women. We extend the methodology to semiparametric quantile estimation. The study is completed by some descriptive analysis, also based on nonparametric techniques. We find that, while the wage gap has diminished from 1995 to 2002 this is mainly due the smaller gap in returns of endowments for wages above the median, and due to the endowments of women for lower and particularly high wages. Respective the quantiles, in contrast to other EU member states, the Spanish wage gap is widest for low wages but almost U-shaped in 2002 whereas this was not that evident in 1995."

Support: Paper