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Cited by 264

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 40 of the 40 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Choosing the Field of Study in Postsecondary Education: Do Expected Earnings Matter?

Beffy, Magali, Fougère, Denis, Maurel, Arnaud·2012·Review of Economics and Statistics

Abstract

This paper examines the determinants of the choice of the college major when the length of studies and future earnings are uncertain. We estimate a three-stage schooling decision model, focusing on the effect of expected earnings on major choice. We control for dynamic selection through the use of mixture distributions. Exploiting variations across the French business cycle in the relative returns to the majors, our results yield a very low, though significant, elasticity of major choice to expected earnings. This suggests that at least for the French university context, nonpecuniary factors are a key determinant of schooling choices.

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Crossref · 10.1162/rest_a_00212

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Metadata

Authors
Beffy, M., Fougère, D., & Maurel, A.
Venue
Review of Economics and Statistics
Publisher
MIT Press
Published
2012-02
Volume
94
Issue
1
Pages
334-347
ISSN
  • 0034-6535 (ISSN-L)
  • 1530-9142
OpenAlex
W2119044790
Cited by
264
References
40
FWCI
76.19
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Choosing the Field of Study in Postsecondary Education: Do Expected Earnings Matter? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1162/rest_a_00212
The paper
Beffy, M., Fougère, D., & Maurel, A. (2012). Choosing the Field of Study in Postsecondary Education: Do Expected Earnings Matter? Review of Economics and Statistics. https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_00212

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.