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| 当代著名经济学家：雅各布·明塞尔 |
作者： 发布时间：2007-11-25 15:45:33 来源：
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Jacob Mincer
(July 15, 1922 - August 20, 2006)
Jacob Mincer, 84, Pioneer on Labor Economics, Dies
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Jacob Mincer, a pioneer in labor economics who was the first to quantify the payoff from education and training, died Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Dr. Flora Kaplan Mincer, said.
Mr. Mincer had spent most of his career as a professor of economics at Columbia University, retiring from active teaching in 1991.
Mr. Mincer’s calculations about the return on human capital came in the 1950’s and 1960’s, when the mixing of mathematics and empirical data was just coming into vogue among economists. Yet, nearly 40 years later, the framework that he developed is still in use.
“His very simple formulation basically fits the data for understanding how earnings are related to educational attainment in virtually every country in every time period,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard University labor economist.
His groundbreaking work never won a Nobel Prize for Mr. Mincer, who was born in Poland and came to the United States on a scholarship in 1948 after spending most of the World War II years imprisoned. But he was frequently nominated for a Nobel by other labor economists, among them David Card of the University of California, Berkeley.
“The close blending of theory and data represented in Mincer’s work has shaped the direction of labor economics and influenced and inspired all those who have followed him,” Mr. Card wrote.
Professor Mincer’s model, drawing on data from the 1950 and 1960 Censuses, was the first to relate income distribution in America to the varying amounts of education and on-the-job training among workers. He calculated, for example, that annual earnings rose by 5 to 10 percent in the 1950’s and 1960’s for every year of additional schooling. There was a similar, although smaller, return on investment in job training — and age played a role.
Young people were willing to stay out of the work force while they invested in college because they had plenty of years to earn back the investment with a substantial return. The same held true for on-the-job training and the willingness of the young to accept lower pay in return for higher wages later in life.
Mr. Mincer summed up this research in a 1974 book, “Schooling, Experience and Earnings” (Columbia University Press). He was also among the first to explore a woman’s role in family earnings, taking his cue from his wife, a radiation oncologist, whom he followed to New York from Chicago when she accepted a hospital residency.
“It came to him later that the contribution of the wife should be applied to family decisions regarding income,” said Dr. Mincer, who interrupted her own career for six years to raise children.
When the couple met in the early 1950’s, Mr. Mincer was a graduate student in economics at the University of Chicago and she a resident in a Chicago hospital. Soon after, she accepted a residency at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and although they were not yet married, he followed her, shifting to Columbia.
Besides his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Deborah M. Mincer and Carolyn F. Mincer, and two grandchildren. A son, Daniel, died of an illness 21 years ago.
Jacob Mincer was born on July 15, 1922, in Tomaszow, Poland, the only son of Isaac Mincer and Deborah Eisen Mincer. When war came, Mr. Mincer was a 16-year-old college freshman in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He spent the war years in and out of prison camps in that country and Germany. His parents and two sisters fled east, but were killed by the advancing German army.
Soon after the war ended, Mr. Mincer won a scholarship financed by the Hillel Foundation to study at Emory University in Atlanta. He earned a bachelor’s degree there in 1950 and moved on to the University of Chicago and then Columbia, earning his Ph.D. in 1957. He taught at City University of New York before joining the Columbia faculty in 1960.
The faculty then included Gary S. Becker, now a University of Chicago economist who later did win a Nobel Prize, for work roughly similar to Mr. Mincer’s. “I put his name forward several times,” Mr. Becker said. “But he was a retiring guy. He did not write op-ed pieces and promote himself actively.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/23/business/
Father of Modern Labor Economics Jacob Mincer Honored for Critical Contributions to the Field
By Lauren Marshall
(Left to right)Nobel Laureate James J. Heckman, Jacob Mincer, Klaus F. Zimmermann, director of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA Bonn, Germany), and Nobel Laureate Gary S. Becker.
One of the greatest economists of the 20th century, Columbia Professor Emeritus Jacob Mincer, also considered by many to be the father of modern labor economics, was honored this week by leading economists, including Nobel Laureates Gary S. Becker and James J. Heckman, at a conference organized on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Mincer helped revolutionize economics by integrating empirical tests with economic theory, helped develop the concept of human capital and pioneered the study of female labor supply taking account of household production.
In recognition of his lifetime achievements in the field, Mincer was awarded the first annual IZA Prize in Labor Economics, a $50,000 award from the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany. The conference, organized by Mincer's former students, focused on human capital and economics of the household, two topics that have greatly benefited from Mincer's work.
"The concepts of human capital and labor supply, the causes of wage differentials between men and women, were expanded by Jacob Mincer and Gary Becker through the famous labor workshop at Columbia in the 1960s," said Provost Jonathan Cole. Mincer's ideas had enormous potential for elaboration and the extraordinary students, such as Nobelist James Heckman, that worked with him expanded upon his ideas to create a major subfield of economics."
"Mincer's insights on labor supply, human capital and fertility helped lay the foundations for understanding how economic development transforms the role of women and the family," said James Heckman, Nobel laureate and professor of economics at the University of Chicago, also one of the organizers of the event. "We are all grateful to Jacob Mincer for illuminating the study of empirical economics and it is our great honor to honor him today for his splendid contributions."
Mincer, a Polish Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the United States in 1948, graduated with a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia (1957) to become a leading member of a group of economists at Columbia and the University of Chicago, known as the Labor Workshop at Columbia and later the Columbia-Chicago School of Economics. Together, this group, which includes Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, developed the empirical foundations of human capital theory and revolutionized the field of labor economics.
In addition to bringing an empirical approach to the analysis of labor and creating the Mincer Earnings Function, still used in economics today, Mincer published a series of seminal papers in labor economics that helped define the field. In these, he developed the theory of human capital, examining how people invest in their skills to earn more later. He also presented the first empirical analysis of learning on the job as a determinant of life cycle wage growth and pioneered the study of female labor supply and the economics of the household. This work showed that accounting for household production and the price of time -- often measured as the market wage -- helps explain why female labor supply increased at a time when real wealth of society was increasing and wealthier people tended to work less. He also used the concept of household production and value of time to explain the correlation between labor supply and fertility. Mincer made seminal contributions to the development of other fields of economics that involve decisions related to household decisions, such as the economics of transportation and consumption. More recently Mincer has done important work on technology and the labor force.
"Even where Jacob Mincer did not initiate new theories, award-winning economic research benefited considerably from his contributions," said Shoshana Grossbard-Shechtman, professor of economics at San Diego State University, who organized the event. "It is distressing that many young economists are unaware of professor Mincer's pioneering role and we hope that this conference will encourage people to give credit where credit is due. Every major figure in labor economics believes that Jacob should have received more recognition from the academy."
In his almost 50-year career, Mincer published more than 50 articles and papers and wrote or contributed to five books. He was named the Buttenwieser Professor of Economics and Human Relations at Columbia in 1979, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and holds a honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago, in addition to a number of other honors and achievements.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/02/07/jacobMincer_award.html
明塞尔的部分论文详见：
http://www.nber.org/cgi-bin/author_papers.pl?author=jacob_mincer
□ Jacob Mincer, Experience and the Distribution of Earnings By Barry R. Chiswick
□ Fifty Years of Mincer Earnings RegressionsBy James J. Heckman Lance J. Lochner and Petra E. Todd
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