The Legacy of the Crisis: The Spanish Labour Market in the Aftermath of the Great Recession

The analysis is divided in three parts. The first part of the report offers descriptive evidence on the legacy of the crisis. It documents the incidence of unemployment by age, education, gender and duration and offers a comparison between Spain and the rest of the countries of the OECD. The reported evidence indicates that long-term unemployment is more pervasive and entrenched than elsewhere in the OECD. Fourteen percent of the civilian labour force is unemployed for more than a year and out of this group almost seventy percent is unemployed for more than two years. Moreover, we document a strong concentration of the longest unemployment spells among disadvantaged groups such as workers from the construction sector, the low-educated and older workers above fifty. In the second part of the report, we proceed with a formal econometric analysis to determine the relative importance of workersí characteristics and the duration of unemployment for the observed job finding probabilities between 2007 and 2015. Finally, in the last part of the report we use longitudinal Social Security data to study the cumulative effects of the crisis for selected groups of workers.