Death Scares : How Potential Work-Migrants Infer Mortality Rates from Migrant Deaths
This paper studies how potential work migrants infer mortality rates from incidents of migrant deaths. In the context of migrant workers from Nepal to Malaysia and the Persian Gulf countries, the study finds that the death of a migrant from a distr...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/107041485189637717/Death-scares-how-potential-work-migrants-infer-mortality-rates-from-migrant-deaths http://hdl.handle.net/10986/25955 |
| Summary: | This paper studies how potential work
migrants infer mortality rates from incidents of migrant
deaths. In the context of migrant workers from Nepal to
Malaysia and the Persian Gulf countries, the study finds
that the death of a migrant from a district lowers migration
outflows in subsequent months. Furthermore, this migration
response is stronger when there have been more migrant
deaths in recent months. Using relevant elasticities, this
study finds that the migration response implies large
changes in mortality rates perceived by potential migrants.
Models of learning fallacies better explain the observed
responses than a standard model of rational Bayesian learning. |
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