INTRODUCTION

The human capital ‘revolution’ began in the 1950s and early 1960s with the research of Theodore W. Schultz, Jacob Mincer, and myself. Schultz’s most influential piece among many on human capital is his presidential address to the American Economic Association (Schultz, 1961). Mincer’s pioneering study was his dissertation published in the Journal of Political Economy in 1958 (Mincer, 1958). He followed that up sixteen years later with his classic book Schooling, Experience, and Earnings (Mincer, 1974). Becker’s most famous human capital studies are the various editions of his book Human Capital (Becker, 1964, 1975, 1993).