Mincer's ground-breaking work: Schooling, Experience and Earnings, published in 1974, used data from the 1950 and 1960 Censuses to relate income distribution in America to the varying amounts of education and on-the-job training among workers.

Papers in the field frequently use Mincerian equations, which model wages as a function of human capital in statistical estimation.

[4] In 1991, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago which recognized his seminal work in the economic analysis of earnings and inequality, the labor force decisions of women and of job mobility.

The citation for the degree also recognized Mincer's work in this area that has helped guide a generation of economists who study these important social questions.

..the decade Jacob and I spent working together was surely one of the most, if not the most exciting and fruitful in my life.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.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.