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Abstract

The paper studies how labor market duality affects human capital accumulation and the wage trajectories of young workers in Spain. Using rich administrative data, we follow workers from their entry into the labor market to measure the experience accumulated under different contractual arrangements and we estimate their wage returns. We document lower returns on experience accumulated under fixed-term contracts (FTCs) compared with open-ended contracts and show that this gap in returns is due to lower human capital accumulation while working under FTCs. This gap widens with worker skill, suggesting that experience and skill-learning are complementary. The widespread use of FTCs holds back wage growth by up to 16 percentage points after 15 years since labor market entry.