Occupational mismatch and moonlighting of Spanish physicians: Do couples matter?

There are important gender differences in the labour-market status of health sciences graduates in Spain: (i) female physicians have lower participation rates than male physicians and, when they work, they are subject to higher occupational mismatch, and (ii) moonlighting is more frequent among male physicians. In this paper we investigate whether such differences are related to the monopsonistic features of the labour market of health-care professionals. Spanish physicians also exhibit another characteristic reducing their geographical mobility in search of a better occupational adjustment: among all university graduates, they are the ones most often coupled to partners with the same educational level and/or same type of studies. Consequently, optimal occupational adjustment of both partners can be a complex process. This stylised fact allows us to provide empirical evidence on a new type of gender discrimination labelled as “within-couple discrimination”, which arises when geographical mobility of couples is favourable to men, so that they achieve better occupational adjustment than women despite having the same human capital. Finally, we analyse if moonlighting can be interpreted as a way of avoiding monopsonistic effects by increasing the labour supply elasticity.