Labor Economics Mincer-Style: A Personal Reflection

Astract

Between 1957 and 1974 Jacob Mincer pioneered important new approaches to labor economics. In the years since these seminal discoveries, he, as well as generations of his students and colleagues at Columbia University and elsewhere, adopted these innovations to reach important conclusions about human wellbeing. In 1967 I was lucky enough to arrive as a graduate student at Columbia University, just at the peak of this research revolution. In this paper, I detail some of my recollections concerning Jacob Mincer and the hospitable research atmosphere at Columbia University that sparked so much of this path breaking research.

This constitutes the first section of the paper “Mincer’s Overtaking Point and the Lifecycle Earnings Distribution” I presented at the Columbia University Conference Honoring Jacob Mincer’s 80^th Birthday, July 2002. I feel honored to be one of Mincer’s students. This paper acknowledges the intellectual debt I owe him for the superb training I received and for the continued interactions and collaborations since. I thank my fellow graduate students at Columbia University (many of whose names are mentioned herein) for helping create a stimulating yet fun intellectual environment during difficult political times. Also, I thank Shoshana Grossbard for encouraging me to split my original paper so this perspective could appear as an independent chapter. Finally, I thank the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University for providing a conducive environment to revise this paper during my sabbatical there.