schooling, and only 2 percent had any college education. The study sample is predominantly rural and participants are equally likely to be from the southern plains (Terai) as from the hills and mountains – again, similar to the distribution of migrants in the census (second panel, columns 1 and 2). Compared to the migrants in the census, the study sample is slightly more likely to be from the mid-western and far-western regions. However, this difference could reflect a change in the actual trend as migration has become more ubiquitous in 2014 than it was in 2011. Similarly, the distribution of migrants looks similar across Malaysia and the Gulf countries in both the samples (third panel, columns 1 and 2).

There are three distinct groups of potential migrants in the study sample. There are 1,411 “inexperienced” potential migrants who have not yet migrated abroad for foreign employment. Of the remainder, 1,341 are “experienced” potential migrants, those who have migrated abroad for work abroad, but do not have an existing employment contract abroad. That is, these individuals have to search for employment again. The remaining 567 potential migrants are “on leave” from their work abroad. That is, they have an existing employment contract abroad and do not have to look for work. They are back in Nepal on a holiday and must renew their passports. For the remainder of the paper, I will use this classification unless explicitly noted otherwise.

The average inexperienced potential migrant is younger and slightly more educated than the experienced one, is 6.4 years younger and has 0.7 more years of schooling (Appendix Table A.2, columns 3 and 4). The difference in schooling is likely to represent the national cohort trend in schooling more than anything else. The geographic distribution of these two groups is quite similar, except that the inexperienced are more likely to be from mid-western and far-western regions than are the experienced ones – again possibly reflecting a geographic trend as migration became more ubiquitous over the years. In terms of destination choices, the inexperienced are more likely to want to go to Malaysia than the experienced.

# **3 Survey design and empirical strategy**

The first part of this section describes the nature of the information provided, along with the experimental design. I then describe the process by which expectations on earnings and mortality were measured. The second part of this section discusses balance checks, and the third part presents the empirical specification.

## **3.1 Design of the informational intervention**

Each of the eligible male subjects who consented to be interviewed was asked questions on basic demographics, location and previous migration experience. They were also asked to name the destination country they were most likely to go to. They were given some information relevant to their chosen destination. The information was provided verbally by the enumerators as well as in the form of a card that the respondents could keep for the duration of the interview. The precise content of the information depended upon a random number generator built into the data-collection devices.

There were three types of information that could be provided to the individuals: basic information, wage information, and death information. When individuals were selected to receive either the wage or the death information, they could get either the ‘high’ variant of the information or the ‘low’ variant. I picked two different information treatment arms because there was no pre-existing information on the beliefs of potential migrants. Providing two different information treatments would ensure that at least one of them would serve as new information to the potential migrants. Since deliberate misinformation was already a concern in this context, I chose not to deceive them. For the wage information, the only source of information available was the wage reports made by previous cohorts of migrants to the DoFE in their application to receive the permit for employment abroad. Therefore, two different years were chosen to generate the ‘high’ and the ‘low’ variant of the wage information, and the year the information was pertinent to was stated clearly when providing the information. For the death information treatment arms, I provided information on the death toll from a reference district. I varied the reference district to generate the ‘high’ and ‘low’ variants. Death toll was provided instead of death rates to emulate the kind of information they would see in reality. Further, providing respondents with numbers prevents them 8