Autor(es): Batista, Catia ; Costa, David M. ; Freitas, Pedro ; Lima, Gonçalo ; Balcão Reis, Ana
Data: 2025
Identificador Persistente: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/176557
Origem: Repositório Institucional da UNL
Assunto(s): Education; Information; International study migration; Lab-in-the-field experiment; Uncertainty; Development; Economics and Econometrics
Funding Information: The authors gratefully acknowledge comments from Toman Barsbai, Cara Ebert, Eliana La Ferrara, David Lagakos, Ben Marx, David McKenzie, Caroline Theoaharides and other participants at several seminars and conferences. We are grateful to our project coordinator Gon\u00E7alo Gameiro for superb work on all aspects of project implementation and data management, as well as to Isabel Gouveia, Mariana Parente and the local team of enumerators for their dedication and careful fieldwork. Funding was provided by the Aga Khan Foundation, grant FCT-AGAKHAN 15417394041-2019. Publisher Copyright: © 2024 The Authors
Study abroad migration is the fastest growing international migration flow. However, the college completion rates of students from low-income countries are often modest in OECD countries, raising the hypothesis that these migrants are poorly informed about the costs and benefits of their decision. Our work tests this hypothesis by running a lab-in-the-field experiment where graduating high school students in Cape Verde are faced with incentivized decisions to apply for college studies abroad. Our results show that potential migrants react strongly to information about the availability of financial support and about college completion rates. Since subjects’ prior beliefs on availability of financial support are overestimated, it is likely that study migrants need to shift their time from study to work after uninformed migration, which likely harms their scholar performance. Policies that inform potential migrants of actual study funding possibilities should decrease study migration flows but may improve successful graduation.
