ABSTRACT
The Mincer earnings function has been the starting point of analysis for numerous studies that have estimated the return to human capital in the labour market and, in the absence of better measures of human capital, years of schooling have been the most used measure of human capital. This chapter discusses how this study expands the standard human capital model by adding cognitive skills and socioemotional skills, and how it re-examines the relationships between a more complete measure of human capital, employment and earnings in the context of middle-income countries. Since the analysis focuses on gender inequality, the chapter also presents the methods used in the next chapters to reveal more dimensions of gender disparities, such as decomposing the gender earnings gap into the part that is due to differences in human capital and the part that is due to the structure of labour markets. This fairly well-known decomposition method helps to identify the existence of “glass ceilings” and “sticky floors” in the workplace. Besides discussing the empirical models that are estimated, the chapter also indicates how the study relates to, and draws from, various strands of the social sciences literature on human capital, labour economics and gender inequality.
