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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, non-pecuniary factors are a key determinant of schooling choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although numerous mathematical models focusing on measles dynamics have been proposed in the literature, efforts in this area have concentrated essentially on the mechanisms of measles propagation. If present, vaccination diffusion is treated as an exogenous factor. Here we propose a model focused on the course of measles in France in which the mechanisms of vaccination diffusion are explicitly modeled. The parameters in this model are estimated by an original method based on an expectation-maximization algorithm. This model gives indications of the way in which measles propagation and vaccination diffusion interact. It also allows discussion of the possibility of eliminating this disease in France in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]