A Land of Milk and Honey with Streets Paved with Gold : Do Emigrants Have Over-Optimistic Expectations about Incomes Abroad?

McKenzie, David ; Gibson, John ; Stillman, Steven

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: CHILD MORTALITY;    CITIZEN;    DEPENDENT CHILDREN;    DESTINATION COUNTRY;    DEVELOPING COUNTRIES;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-4141
RP-ID  :  WPS4141

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Millions of people emigrate every yearin search of better economic and social opportunities.Anecdotal evidence suggests that emigrants may haveover-optimistic expectations about the incomes they can earnabroad, resulting in excessive migration pressure, and indisappointment among those who do migrate. Yet there isalmost no statistical evidence on how accurately theseemigrants predict the incomes that they will earn workingabroad. In this paper the authors combine a naturalemigration experiment with unique survey data on would-beemigrants' probabilistic expectations about employmentand incomes in the migration destination. Their procedureenables them to obtain moments and quantiles of thesubjective distribution of expected earnings in thedestination country. The authors find a significantunderestimation of both unconditional and conditional laborearnings at all points in the distribution. Thisunderestimation appears driven in part by potential migrantsplacing too much weight on the negative employmentexperiences of some migrants, and by inaccurate informationflows from extended family, who may be trying to moderateremittance demands by understating incomes.