While there have been a number of surveys on the Mincer earnings function, they focus heavily on econometric issues. While covering a number of econometric issues, Earnings over the Lifecycle focuses on the underlying economics behind the Mincer earnings function and its robustness and relevance to policy applications.

Topics include verifying the consistently observed cross-sectional concavity and corroborating implications regarding earnings distribution particularly at the ""overtaking"" level of experience, across many countries and demographic groups. Among the policy relevant applications are how to use Mincer's theories to estimate discrimination, particularly race and gender differences in both earnings and occupational distributions. In addition, this book shows how the earnings function can be adapted to measure incomplete information inlabour markets, an extension which is important in measuring the competitiveness of particular labour markets.

The final part explores incentive based compensation schemes. Some argue that such contract models complement human capital in explaining wages and otherlabour market phenomena; others argue that contract models substitute for the human capital model. The book concludes that one has to consider both types of models simultaneously in a unified framework to determine the relative merits of each.