This paper proposes an econometric methodology to deal with life cycle earnings and mobility among discrete earnings classes. First, we use panel data on male log earnings to estimate an earnings function with permanent and serially correlated transitory components due to both measured and...

This paper is concerned with the growth of individual earnings over time. Four aspects of time are distinguished: experience, age, vintage and calendar year. The first section of the paper provides a brief outline of a theory of planned growth in earnings. The second and main section of the...

The major findings of this study are as follows: (1) Simple cross section estimates grossly underestimate cohort profiles during the period 1960-70. Furthermore the growth in earnings is not uniform across experience groups and more recent vintages tend to have steeper profiles in most fields....

Recent development of explicit theoretical and empirical earnings functions from life cycle human capital investment models increases the potential to explain existing earnings distributions and to predict changes in it. The purpose of this paper is to suggest how these earnings functions can be...