Choosing the Field of Study in Postsecondary Education: Do Expected Earnings Matter?
By M. Beffy, D. Fougère, Arnaud Maurel. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2012
264 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24b5a01d5165dafc0d80cc47feeab558caf4341a
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Citations in the corpus
- Good Skills in Bad Times: Cyclical Skill Mismatch and the Long-Term Effects of Graduating in a Recession (2016, unknown): “Berger (1988) and Beffy, Fougère, and Arnaud (2012) provide evidence that the choice of field by college students is not very responsive to business cycle variations in labor market conditions.”
- The Specificity of General Human Capital: Evidence from College Major Choice (2015, background): “However, both Arcidiacono (2004) and Be↵y et al. (2009) find that much of the sorting into technical fields is related to preferences as opposed to expected income.”
- College Major Choice and the Gender Gap (2013, background): “…Easterlin 1995; Weinberger 2004), few studies have jointly modeled the pecuniary and nonpecuniary determinants of the choice (Arcidiacono 2004; Beffy, Fougere, and Maurel 2012).3 The approach in this paper allows me to quantify the contributions of both pecuniary and nonpecuniary outcomes to…”