Event Date
SPEAKER: Emanuela Furfaro (Visiting Assistant Professor, Statistics, UC Davis)
TITLE: "Bayesian Demography: an application to the study of sub-national migration flows"
ABSTRACT: Demography is the study of human population dynamics, and it has an important role in many disciplines since the structure of a country’s population impacts its labor market, its economy, and its social policies. Understanding, estimating, and projecting demographic quantities, such as fertility, mortality, and migration, is hence an essential task in many disciplines. In the last few years, this task has been approached with the use of Bayesian Statistics which allows to describe the uncertainty around these quantities in a coherent manner. After an introduction to the subject, I will present an ongoing work on sub-national migration flows. In particular, we use data on sub-national migration in Italy and we develop a Bayesian Extended Gravity Model, which includes demographic and geographic covariates, for testing theories of migration. We also propose several Bayesian models for forecasting migration flows between all pairs of provinces, finding that they perform well and give well-calibrated intervals.
This seminar will be delivered remotely via Zoom. To access the Zoom meeting for this seminar, please contact the instructor Mina Karzand or MSO Pete Scully ([email protected]) for the meeting ID and password, stating your affiliation.