Overview
Jacob Mincer (1922–2006) was a labor economist at Columbia University and one of the founders of the human capital approach to earnings alongside Gary Becker. His 1974 book Schooling, Experience and Earnings (Columbia University Press) introduced the Mincerian earnings equation — log w = α + ρS + βX + γX², where S is years of schooling, X is potential experience, and ρ ≈ 0.07–0.10 in U.S. data — which became the universal workhorse framework for empirical earnings research. Every study of the causal return to education (Card 1999, Angrist and Krueger 1991, Ashenfelter and Rouse 1998) builds on this specification.
Key Contributions / Features
- Mincerian earnings function: log w = α + ρS + βX + γX². The semilog form implies that each additional year of schooling raises log wages by a constant proportion ρ (the "Mincer return"). The quadratic in potential experience captures the lifecycle concavity of earnings profiles that arises from declining on-the-job training investment over the career.
- On-the-job training theory (Mincer 1962, JPE): Derived the experience-earnings profile from an investment framework: workers accept lower early wages in exchange for skill acquisition; earnings then rise steeply and flatten as training declines with proximity to retirement.
- Schooling and the distribution of earnings: Mincer showed that variation in schooling accounts for a substantial fraction of cross-sectional earnings inequality, connecting the human capital model to macroeconomic facts about wage distributions.
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