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Record W1555034039 · doi:10.3386/w9732

Fifty Years of Mincer Earnings Regressions

2003· report· en· W1555034039 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueNational Bureau of Economic Research · 2003
Typereport
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicFiscal Policy and Economic Growth
Canadian institutionsWestern University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEarningsEconomicsEconometricsRate of returnPopulationCornerstoneActuarial scienceAccountingGeographyFinanceDemography

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The Mincer earnings function is the cornerstone of a large literature in empirical economics. This paper discusses the theoretical foundations of the Mincer model and examines the empirical support for it using data from Decennial Censuses and Current Population Surveys. While data from 1940 and 1950 Censuses provide some support for Mincer's model, data from later decades are inconsistent with it. We examine the importance of relaxing functional form assumptions in estimating internal rates of return to schooling and of accounting for taxes, tuition, nonlinearity in schooling, and nonseparability between schooling and work experience. Inferences about trends in rates of return to high school and college obtained from our more general model differ substantially from inferences drawn from estimates based on a Mincer earnings regression. Important differences also arise between cohort-based and cross-sectional estimates of the rate of return to schooling. In the recent period of rapid technological progress, widely used cross-sectional applications of the Mincer model produce dramatically biased estimates of cohort returns to schooling. We also examine the implications of accounting for uncertainty and agent expectation formation. Even when the static framework of Mincer is maintained, accounting for uncertainty substantially affects the return estimates. Considering the sequential resolution of uncertainty over time in a dynamic setting gives rise to option values, which fundamentally changes the analysis of schooling decisions. In the presence of sequential resolution of uncertainty and option values, the internal rate of return -a cornerstone of classical human capital theory -is not a useful guide to policy analysis.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.007
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.938
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0070.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.426
GPT teacher head0.479
Teacher spread0.052 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it