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Jacob MincerAmerican economist, founder of modern labor economics
Date of Birth: 15.07.1922
Country:  Poland |
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Jacob Mincer: Founder of Modern Labor Economics
Jacob Mincer, also known as Yakob Mincer, was an American economist and the founder of modern labor economics. He was a professor of economics and social relations at Columbia University for most of his academic career. Mincer was born on July 15, 1922, in Tomaszów, Poland, into a Jewish family. He survived World War II in concentration camps in Czechoslovakia and Germany, where he was taken as a teenager. After liberation, he immigrated to the United States and graduated from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia in 1950. In 1957, he received his doctoral degree from Columbia University in New York City. Two years later, in 1959, Mincer joined the faculty at Columbia University, where he remained a professor for 32 years until his retirement in 1991. In addition, Mincer taught at City College of New York, Hebrew University, Stockholm School of Economics, and the University of Chicago.
Contributions to Labor Economics
From 1960 until his death, Mincer was a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a non-profit research organization. Mincer is widely regarded as the father of modern labor economics. Along with Nobel laureate Gary Becker, Mincer helped develop the empirical foundations of human capital theory, revolutionizing the field of labor economics. Throughout his academic career, Mincer authored four books and hundreds of journal articles, reports, and essays.
In his groundbreaking work "Schooling, Experience and Earnings," published in 1974 by Columbia University Press, Mincer used data from the 1950 and 1960 censuses to examine the income distribution in America based on education, training, and occupation. He found that in the 1950s and 1960s, annual earnings increased by 5-10% for each additional year of education. Mincer's work also showed the existence of a similar, albeit smaller, return on occupational training and the impact of age on workers' earnings. His research continues to have a significant influence on the field of labor economics. Mincer equations, which model wage determination based on human capital, are widely used in labor economics research today. Thanks to his pioneering work, education and work experience have become the most commonly used measures of human capital.
Awards and Legacy
In 1991, Mincer was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in recognition of his contributions to income and inequality analysis, the study of women as an economically active population, and labor mobility. His work in these areas helped shape the research of a whole generation of economists studying these crucial social issues. In honor of his lifetime achievements, Mincer received the first IZA Prize in Labor Economics, a prestigious award given by the Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany. The monetary portion of the prize, $50,000, was presented to him at Columbia University in 2002, where over a hundred of his former students were in attendance.
In 2004, he was the recipient of the Career Achievement Award from the Society of Labor Economists at the University of Chicago. This annual award was subsequently named the Mincer Award in his honor. Although Jacob Mincer never received a Nobel Prize, his colleagues, recognizing him as one of the greatest economists of the 20th century, nominated him for the prize multiple times.
