THE EXPERIENCE-EARNINGS PROFILE IN AUSTRALIA

This paper investigates the 'goodness-of-fit' and effect on estimates of the experience-earnings profile of alternative specifications of th e human capital earnings function for a sample of full-time male worke rs in Australia. It is concluded that it is difficult to differentiate between specifications of the earnings function which include a cubic experience term, cubic plus quartic experience terms, or a linear spl ine function in experience-each of these specifications appears to mar ginally dominate the quadratic specification and a non-parametric appr oach. A modified Gompertz function is found to perform poorly.