Get Rich or Die Tryin' : Perceived Earnings, Perceived Mortality Rate and the Value of a Statistical Life of Potential Work-Migrants from Nepal
Do potential migrants have accurate information about the risks and returns of migrating abroad? And, given the information they have, what is their revealed willingness to trade risks for higher earnings? To answer these questions, this paper sets...
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/112411485188909692/Get-rich-or-die-tryin-perceived-earnings-perceived-mortality-rate-and-the-value-of-a-statistical-life-of-potential-work-migrants-from-Nepal http://hdl.handle.net/10986/25954 |
| Summary: | Do potential migrants have accurate
information about the risks and returns of migrating abroad?
And, given the information they have, what is their revealed
willingness to trade risks for higher earnings? To answer
these questions, this paper sets up and analyzes a
randomized field experiment among 3,319 potential work
migrants from Nepal to Malaysia and the Persian Gulf
countries. The experiment provides them with information on
wages and mortality incidences in their choice destination,
and tracks their migration decision three months later. The
findings show that potential migrants severely overestimate
their mortality rate abroad, and that information on
mortality incidences lowers this expectation. Potential
migrants without prior foreign migration experience also
overestimate their earnings potential abroad, and
information on earnings lowers this expectation. Using
exogenous variation in expectations for the inexperienced
potential migrants generated by the experiment, the study
estimates migration elasticities of 0.7 in expected earnings
and 0.5 in expected mortality. The experiment allows the
calculation of the trade-off the inexperienced potential
migrants make between earnings and mortality risk, and hence
their value of a statistical life. The estimates range from
US$0.28 million to US$0.54 million, which is a reasonable
range for a poor population. |
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