importance ranking (decreasing order) from Random Forest and rate of appearance ranking (decreasing order) from LASSO Stability Selection. The concavity of the pseudo R-square curves indicate that there is no substantial gain from additional predictors (beyond our lists of 30 predictors) from each method. The inflection points for adjusted R-square are around 10 to 15 variables, lower than our base specification with 30 variables, which also indicates that we are not losing from the data by capping it at 30 variables.

Interestingly, the maximum value of the R-squared never exceeds 0.19 for men and women, which also suggest that a large part of the variance in the data remains unexplained, even when adding the complete list of 301 variables in the logistic regression. This argument complements the discussion on predictive power of the model in Section 5.1.

# 5.3. Migration interest and actual migration

The positive correlation between interest in migration and actual migration has been shown in the literature (Creighton, 2013; Milasi, 2020; van Dalen & Henkens, 2013). Interest in migration illustrates aspirations that are less impacted by physical mobility barriers than actual migration. The relevance of studying interest in migration is therefore to overcome the selection bias of only observing migrants. For instance, if such predictions are aimed at better targeting potential migrants to provide them with information on safe migration processes, using actual past migration to do so would suffer from important endogeneity biases, blurring the profile of potential migrants. An interesting addition to our analysis would be to observe the extent to which individuals who are interested in migration are able to materialize this aspiration and whether the predictors of interest in migration perform well to predict actual migration.

In order to look further into the relationship between interest in migration and more materialized migration plans, we compute two indices aggregating different variables for each family of outcomes following Kling, Liebman, and Katz (2007): (i) knowledge about migration process index and (ii) preparation to migrate index.<sup>22</sup>

> 22 The knowledge about the migration process index is constructed using these variables: don’t know where to look for information on work abroad (reverse coded); don’t know where to register for work abroad, if interested (reverse coded); don’t know which documents are required to work abroad (reverse coded); don’t know the risks associated with working abroad without all the necessary documents (reverse coded); know whether migrant friends/acquaintances faced any problem in the process of migration; don’t know what type of problem their friends/acquaintances  faced (reverse coded).

> Preparation to migrate index is constructed using these variables: completed a health test before migrating in the past; don’t know about health test required by the official migration process (reverse coded); completed a training before migrating in the past; don’t know about training required by the official migration process (reverse coded); don’t know the content of the training (reverse coded); participated in pre-departure sessions; don’t know about any pre-departure sessions required by the official migration process (reverse coded).

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