Travis Baseler

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2017 - 2018 Academic Year

Information Asymmetries and the Perceived Returns to Migration: Experimental Evidence from Kenya

Rural individuals require reasonably accurate information about destination labor market conditions to compute expected migration returns. Gathering such information can be costly, and in-network migrants face incentives to understate income to reduce remittance demands. In an ongoing experiment in Western Kenya, Baseler randomly exposes rural households to information on urban labor markets. Treated households are 9 percentage points more likely (on a base of 12%) to send a migrant to Nairobi and earn 30% more income. Origin households underestimate total earnings of migrants from their own households by 49%, suggesting that income misreporting may be behind the persistently low beliefs.

Travis Baseler, Department of Economics

Travis Baseler is a PhD candidate in the department of economics at Stanford University. Prior to attending Stanford, he received a BA from Columbia University, where he studied economics and mathematics. His research focuses on internal migration in developing countries. Baseler’s most recent work studies information barriers to migration using a field experiment in rural Kenya.

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