The decision to migrate involves the comparison of income gains and other benefits associated to the move with its pecuniary and non-pecuniary costs. To estimate the expected returns of moving to alternative destinations, potential immigrants gather information from different sources. By providing information on the migration process, facilitating the access to the job market and helping integration upon arrival, networks are crucial to individual migration decisions. In order to isolate the role of information on migration decisions, we focus on an alternative popular source of information: exposure to television. Internal migration in Indonesia is not a recent phenomenon. Already during the last period of the Dutch rule, the country had a highly geographically mobile population. According to the 1930 census, 11.5% of the total native population lived outside their district of birth. In this paper, it has been shown that having better media coverage of one’s own country does not necessarily increase the incentives to internally migrate. More information leads to more accurate migration choices. Hence, the final effect on migration depends on whether individuals were under rather than over-estimating the potential gains from migrating. We uncover a strong negative effect of TV exposure on the propensity to internally migrate, thus suggesting that Indonesian citizens, prior to the expansion of private TV broadcasting, were too optimistic in assessing the potential gains from moving.
URL : 20140115041035.pdf