Dear Colleagues,
It was with great sadness that I have been informed Jacob Mincer
(Professor Emeritus of Economics at Columbia University, New York) has
passed away on August 20 at the age of 84. Jacob Mincer was one of the
founding fathers of modern empirical labor economics.
Jacob Mincer was born in Tomaszow (Poland) on 15 July 1922 to Dvora and
Yitzchak Mincer, and like many of his generation, his life was
tragically disrupted due to the terrible consequences of World War II.
During WWII he was arrested several times and spent most of the time in
detention camps. After the war, and realizing that he had lost all his
close family members, he was determined to leave Europe and in 1948 he
was offered a Scholarship from the Hillel Foundation and moved the
United States to continue his studies. He did his undergraduate studies
in Economics at Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia), graduating in 1950.
He initially started his graduate studies in Economics at the University
of Chicago, but then moved to Columbia, due to personal reasons.
After finishing his PhD in 1957 at Columbia, Mincer moved back to
Chicago to a post-doctoral fellowship, staying there during the 1957-8
academic year and interacting closely with people such as Gregg Lewis,
Albert Rees and T. W. Schultz. These would stimulate him to pursue
further his work on human capital and labour economics. Mincer then
returned for another brief spell to the City College of New York, as
assistant professor (1958-60), and finally in 1960 he joined the Faculty
of Economics at Columbia as an associate professor. He would develop
most of his career at Columbia, becoming a full professor in 1962 and
Buttenwieser Professor of Economics in 1979; and he has been an emeritus
professor since 1991. It was also at Columbia that Mincer developed a
very fruitful professional interaction with Gary Becker who had moved to
Columbia in the late fifties (1958). They created the Columbia Workshop
on Labor Economics which would be extremely influential in the
development of human capital research and contemporary labor economics.
Mincer remained at Columbia until his retirement and continued to
influence several generations of labor economists through his continued
interest in human capital topics. This influence was enhanced by
Mincer's ability to develop research work in a collaborative way with
his former students or younger colleagues. Mincer's pioneering work on
human capital theory, labour supply, and many other important topics
will leave a lasting legacy in labour research.
Despite his well-known discretion, Mincer was awarded several honors
throughout his career that recognized the relevance of his work to
economics and social sciences in general. These included a Distinguished
Fellowship of the American Economic Association in 1989, an honorary
degree from the University of Chicago in 1991, and the first IZA Prize
in Labor Economics in 2002. He is a fellow of the American Statistical
Association (since 1967) and a member of the National Academy of
Education (since 1974), which demonstrate not only his broad interests
but also the relevance of his research to a large and multidisciplinary
community of scholars. In 2000 he has been elected to the National
Academy of Sciences, one of the highest academic honors in the US. In
2004, the Society of Labor Economists created a career achievement award
for lifetime contributions to the field of labor economics and awarded
it in its first year to Jacob Mincer and Gary Becker. The prize was
later renamed the Mincer Award.
Mincer is survived by his wife, Dr. Flora Mincer, his two daughters and
two grandchildren.
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