# **1 Introduction**

Media reports abound on numbers of migrants dying on their way to the destination countries or during their stay abroad. Within the first nine months of 2016, over 3,600 migrants have died in the Mediterranean Sea while on their way to Europe (International Organization for Migration, 2015). In 2014, about 445 people died while trying to cross the US-Mexico border (Carroll, 2015). The large death toll is not just the plight of those who try to migrate illegally or those who are forced to move. The Guardian reports that almost 1,000 workers, all of whom were legal migrants from Nepal, India and Bangladesh, died in Qatar in 2012 and 2013 (Gibson, 2014). Do potential migrants know the mortality rate abroad and choose to migrate anyway? If not, how do they infer the mortality rate from incidences of migrant death that they observe around them?

Depending upon how they process the information, learning from observed deaths may lead to an overestimate or an underestimate of the actual mortality rate. In this paper, I study how migration decision is affected by the death of migrants in the context of Nepali work-migrants to Malaysia and the Persian Gulf countries. I combine these estimates of migration responsiveness to death events, along with the estimate of the value of statistical life (VSL) and elasticities from Shrestha (2017) to infer how much each death changes a potential migrant’s perceived mortality rate abroad.

If potential migrants have full information about the risk of death, or if they believe so, then their decision to migrate will have already factored in the (perceived) probability of death during migration. They will take realizations of death as conveying zero information and will not change their migration decision in response to incidences of death.<sup>1</sup> This presents a simple test of whether potential migrants are fully informed about the risk of death upon migration: if migration decision responds to death incidents, then potential migrants are not fully informed about the risk of death from migration.

I find that death of a migrant worker significantly lowers migration. Specifically, I study the effect of a migrant death in a district-destination cell on migration flows from the district in the subsequent months. After controlling for potential confounds with district-destination fixed effects, district-month fixed effects and destination-month fixed effects, one migrant death reduces monthly migrant flow from that district to the same destination (as the deceased migrant) by 1.2 percent for up to a year after the death. This clearly indicates that potential migrants do not consider themselves fully informed (and rational) on the mortality risk abroad. I also find some increase in migrant flow from the district to other destination countries. However, the amount of substitution to other destination does not fully offset the negative effect. Overall, one migrant death (in any destination) in a district reduces total monthly migration outflow from that district (to any destinations) by 0.9 percent for the subsequent year.

The size of the effect, even without considering the spillover effects on the neighboring districts, is notably large. During the period of this study, 550 work migrants died annually, which led a reduction in migrant flow of almost 18,000 individuals (from the districts of the deceased) over the period of a year. The forgone income of this reduction is at least $57 million, which translates to 0.3 percent of the average annual national GDP for that period.<sup>2</sup> The forgone income, accounting for spillover

> 1With the obvious caveat that the deceased do not affect the ability of the potential migrants to undertake migration (that is, the deceased are not family or close relatives).

> 2The forgone income includes the monetary cost of migration, but does not include any non-monetary cost of migration. It also does not adjust for the cost of living abroad (which, in many cases, is already netted into the income).

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