13:10 - 14:50
P13
Room:
Room: South Hall 2B
Panel Session 13
Lachlan McNamee - Why States Colonize and Why They Stop: Evidence from New Guinea
Gerald Schneider - Fear thy visitor: The demand and supply of visa in the Schengen area after terrorist events
Alexandra Hartman, Sigrid Weber - Property Rights and Post-Conflict Recovery: Evidence from IDP Return Movements in Iraq
Nikhar Gaikwad - Bridging the Gulf: Experimental Evidence on Migration's Impact on Tolerance and Internationalism
Bernd Beber, Alexandra Scacco - Information and Irregular Migration: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Nigeria
Information and Irregular Migration: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Nigeria
P13-5
Presented by: Bernd Beber, Alexandra Scacco
Bernd Beber 1, 2Alexandra Scacco 2, Macartan Humphreys 2, 3, Pheliciah Mwachofi 4, Dean Yang 5
1 RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research
2 WZB Berlin Social Science Center
3 Columbia University
4 Innovations for Poverty Action
5 University of Michigan
Policy projections and recent research suggest that large numbers of irregular migrants from sub-Saharan Africa will continue to attempt to make their way to Europe over the next few decades. In response, European countries have made and continue to make significant investments in information campaigns designed to discourage irregular African migration. These campaigns are frequently accompanied by evaluations of some sort but, to our knowledge, none have involved a well-powered randomized controlled trial with a representative sample and actual migration as an outcome. We report results from such a field experiment that we implemented in 2020 and 2021 with 3200 households in Edo and Delta states in Nigeria, in which treated households received detailed, accurate information about features of the journey along the "Mediterranean route." We estimate effects of this information on beliefs about migration-related risks, interest in attempting irregular migration, and actual migration from treated households, using data from a midline conducted six months after treatment and an endline after twelve months.