1. No going back: COVID-19 disease threat perception and male migrants' willingness to return to work in India.
- Author
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Arora, Varun, Chakravarty, Sujoy, Kapoor, Hansika, Mukherjee, Shagata, Roy, Shubhabrata, and Tagat, Anirudh
- Subjects
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COVID-19 , *RETURN migrants , *IMMIGRANTS , *MIGRANT labor , *CITIES & towns , *INTERNAL migration , *RISK perception - Abstract
• Examine link between perceived COVID-19 risk and return decision among migrants. • Use novel survey data of 495 reverse male migrants in India in april-may 2020. • Migrants with greater perceived COVID-19 infection risk less willing to return. • Impatience positively associated with greater willingness to return. • Higher recall of prevention strategies linked to lower perceived COVID-19 risk. This paper explores the causal link between the likelihood of re-migration to cities and the perceived threat of contracting COVID-19 using novel data on male reverse migrant workers in India. We find that reverse-migrants who believe there is a significant chance of contracting COVID-19 display a significantly lower likelihood of returning to their urban workplaces, regardless of their duration of migration. On the other hand, longer-duration migrants display a lower perceived chance of contracting COVID-19 than shorter-duration migrants. We also contribute to the migration literature by linking behavioural attributes to the decision to migrate. We find that more impatient individuals display a heightened belief regarding contracting COVID-19 and a higher projected likelihood of returning to work. Finally, we find that while both loss and risk-averse individuals have a lower projected likelihood of returning to urban workplaces, only loss-averse individuals perceive that their chance of contracting COVID-19 is lower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
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