themselves to high risk of mortality by migrating to these countries. In recent years, national and international media have given considerable attention to the numbers of Nepali workers who die abroad, and to the exploitative conditions they work under. (see Pattisson, 2013b, and several ensuing articles in _The Guardian_ , for instance). With a distinctly humanitarian perspective,they portray the system, as a ‘modern-day slavery’. This focus could give potential migrants a misleading impression of mortality rates, as the stocks of Nepali migrants in these countries are rarely included in these reports. Further, deaths of men of the same age group in Nepal rarely receive media or policy attention unless they are a result of some horrific accident. Such biases in reporting could make it much harder for potential migrants to be accurately informed about the underlying death rates from migration abroad.

All of this culminates in a belief among policymakers that potential migrants, knowingly or unknowingly, are trading high risks at unreasonably low prices. However, policymakers’ beliefs are, after all, beliefs – not often fully guided by rigorous evidence. For instance, there is no evidence on potential migrants’ actual beliefs on mortality rate and whether they actually respond to media coverage of deaths. The higher death tolls could, in fact, simply reflect increased migration to those destinations as a result of increased opportunities abroad.

# **2.2 Study setting and sample**

The baseline survey for this study and the experiment was conducted at the Department of Passport (DoP) in Kathmandu in January, 2015. Though Nepali citizens can obtain a new passport from the office of the Chief District Officer in their respective district headquarters at a cost of US $50, it takes almost 3 months to receive a passport. On the other hand, if they apply for their passports at the DoP in Kathmandu, they can opt for the ‘fast-track’ option and obtain their passport within a week at a cost of US $100. Many potential migrants, who are often guided by local agents, use this expedited service to obtain their passports. DoP officials estimated that during the period of the study, an average of 2,500 individuals applied for passports every day. However, not everyone who has a passport will eventually migrate.<sup>12</sup> In fact, many of the study subjects mentioned that they were not sure whether they would eventually go for foreign employment and were applying for passports just to have the option of going abroad.

For this study, passport applicants who just finished submitting their applications were approached and screened for eligibility for the study. Any male applicant who expressed an intention of working in Malaysia or the Persian Gulf countries was eligible. Enumerators explained the purpose of this study, and those who consented to be interviewed were taken to a designated section on the premises of DoP for the full interview.<sup>13</sup> At this stage, the passport applicants were told that the purpose of the study was to find out how well informed potential migrants were about work migration abroad, and to see how information affected their migration decision. They were not told the exact nature of the information treatment.

The DoP office is a busy environment, yet the study was conducted in an area reserved exclusively for the study, free from outside interference. The DoP restricts non-applicants from entering the premises of the office, due to the volume of applicants, so no family members, friends, or local recruitment agents interfered with the interviews.<sup>14</sup> Between January 4, 2015 and February 3, 2015, we interviewed 3,319 eligible potential migrants. Though the study was conducted in the DoP in Kathmandu, it appears to be representative of the population of current migrants in the country (Appendix Table A.2). The average potential migrant in the study sample is 27.6 years of age and has 7.5 years of schooling, quite similar to the age and schooling of current migrants in the 2011 census (top panel, columns 1 and 2). It is important to note that the study sample is predominantly low-skilled. Only 15 percent of the sample had completed more than 10 years of

> 12The estimates of the number of Nepali leaving the country hovers around 1,000 to 2,000 per day, many of whom may have old passports.

> 13Due to the large volume of people submitting their applications, the enumerators could not systematically keep a record of how many people they approached in a day. Though the office accepted applications from 8:00 AM until 4:00 PM, most eligible applicants chose the morning hours. On most days, the eligible applicants stopped coming in by 2:00 PM. 14The DoP made an exception for this study by letting the enumerators inside the premises and allowing them to conduct the interviews.

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