IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ctc/serie1/def136.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Informing Risky Migration: Evidence from a field experiment in Guinea

Author

Listed:
  • Giacomo Battiston
  • Lucia Corno

    (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
    Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)

  • Eliana La Ferrara

Abstract

Can providing information to potential migrants in uence their decisions about risky and irregular migration? We conduct an experiment with over 7,000 secondary school students in Guinea, providing information through video testimonials by migrants who settled in Europe and through aggregate statistics. We implement three treatments: (i) information about the risks of the journey; (ii) information about economic outcomes in the destination country; and (iii) a combination of both. One month after the intervention, all treatments led students to update their beliefs about the risks and the economic outcomes of migration, resulting in decreased intentions to migrate. One year later, the Risk Treatment resulted in a 51% decline in migration outside Guinea. This e ect was driven by a decrease in migration without a visa (i.e., potentially risky and irregular) and was more pronounced among poorer students. These findings are consistent with the predictions of a model where individuals choose between not migrating, migrating regularly, or migrating irregularly, and where information increases the perceived cost of irregular migration, thus decreasing migration among poorer students who cannot a ord regular migration.

Suggested Citation

  • Giacomo Battiston & Lucia Corno & Eliana La Ferrara, 2024. "Informing Risky Migration: Evidence from a field experiment in Guinea," DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza def136, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE).
  • Handle: RePEc:ctc:serie1:def136
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dipartimenti.unicatt.it/economia-finanza-def136.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2024
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    irregular migration; tracking; information experiment; Guinea.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F22 - International Economics - - International Factor Movements and International Business - - - International Migration
    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
    • D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty
    • C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ctc:serie1:def136. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Simone Moriconi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dscatit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.