Millions of people emigrate every year in search of better economic and social
opportunities. Anecdotal evidence suggests that emigrants may have over-optimistic
expectations about the incomes they can earn abroad, resulting in excessive
migration pressure, and in disappointment amongst those who do migrate. Yet there
is almost no statistical evidence on how accurately these emigrants predict the
incomes that they will earn working abroad. In this paper we combine a natural
emigration experiment with unique survey data on would-be emigrants’ probabilistic
expectations about employment and incomes in the migration destination. Our
procedure enables us to obtain moments and quantiles of the subjective distribution
of expected earnings in the destination country. We find a significant underestimation
of both unconditional and conditional labor earnings at all points in the
distribution. This under-estimation appears driven in part by potential migrants
placing too much weight on the negative employment experiences of some
migrants, and by inaccurate information flows from extended family, who may be
trying to moderate remittance demands by understating incomes
