Economics Research Community Seminar

Title: Expected Benefits and Costs of Migration for Rural Youth: Experimental Evidence from India
Date: 12 October 2022
Time: 13:00-14:00
Location: NUBS 4.06

Guest Speaker: Apurav is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Economics at the University of Birmingham. His primary fields are Political
Economy, Development and Labour Economics. Read more about his work here: https://sites.google.com/view/apuravbhatiya/home

If you would like to attend, please register using the following link: https://forms.office.com/r/md1vHJ9Hxm.

Abstract
This paper studies how disadvantaged young job seekers in rural India weigh up job location and salary in their decisions to join a training program with guaranteed placement in a formal salaried job. We show that prospective candidates are over-optimistic: they expect a job closer to home and a higher salary than the program offers. In a randomized experiment, we provide them with objective information on the distribution of job locations, on the salary distribution, or both. The intervention successfully corrects their beliefs, and affects their decision to join the program. Revealed preference estimates suggest that job seekers require a 24% higher salary to compensate for a 10% increase in the probability of being placed outside of their home state. Our results suggest that over-optimistic beliefs and high migration costs are important barriers to the inclusion of rural youth into urban labor markets of developing countries.