classify these occupations properly, I define a category ‘non-construction’ that includes all jobs that are definitely not in construction sector. The remaining jobs are either in construction or in other sectors that are not classifiable. As Table 2 shows, only a third of the workers identified going to work that can be classified as not being in the construction sector and there is a large variation across destinations (column 6).

Furthermore, the reported wages and fees from this source differ from the expectations of potential workers. In Shrestha (2017), I find that potential work migrants expect to earn much higher while abroad and pay much higher fees to migrate to these destinations. The discrepancy results from misinformation in part of the potential migrants as well as misreporting from migrants to DoFE. Migrants may misreport their wages and fees to DoFE as the government has regulations on minimum wage and maximum fees for workers seeking employment abroad. Furthermore, the wages reported to DoFE do not include overtime work, which can be a large part of migrant earnings abroad. In any case, the wages reported here _are_ contractual wages and potential migrants have to submit a copy of the contract from the employer for their application to the DoFE.

# **2.3 Data on migrant deaths**

The data on migrant deaths comes from the Foreign Employment Promotion Board (FEPB). FEPB is a government body established to make foreign migration safe and organized. One of its main tasks include providing financial support to the family of the deceased and helping them retrieve bodies of the deceased workers. When a registered (received labor permits from DoFE) migrant worker dies abroad, his family is eligible to receive a compensation (of over $1,500 for the study period) through the FEPB. The FEPB provides compensation for any kind of death as long as the migrant had obtained permits from DoFE, died within the duration of his contract, and the family files a claim within a year of the date of death with necessary documents. The necessary documents would typically be issued by local authorities after verifying that the claimant is indeed related to the deceased migrant worker. This verification process may also aid in the transmission of the news of a migrant death in addition to the word-of-mouth diffusion of news among potential migrants. The records at FEPB are considered quite comprehensive counts of the death of registered migrant workers abroad.<sup>6</sup> The data used in this paper contains all such claims made with FEPB for deaths that occurred from January 2009 to December 2013. For each deceased (anonymized), I observe the date of death, the country of death, district of residence in Nepal and the cause of death reported in the death certificate. Figure 3 shows the total number of deaths for every month in each of the major destination countries. The figure shows an increase in the reported number of deaths in most destinations akin to the increase in migrant outflow. Because migrant deaths are rare events, the numbers look sporadic for countries with smaller migrant flows, and therefore a small migrant stock. I aggregate this data up to the district-destination-month cell for analysis. Each district-destination cell experienced 0.1 deaths in a month, with the variation across destinations resembling the migrant stocks in the destination countries (Column 2, Table 2).

Though considered an accurate source of information on the number of migrant deaths, this data

> 6Note that it is not the complete census of all deaths of Nepali workers abroad as it relies on the claims made by the family of the deceased.

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