Emilio Zagheni

Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Background Extreme temperatures are associated with negative health outcomes, in particular for older adults with pre-existing conditions. While climate change is expected to increase exposure to temperature levels that are detrimental for health, little is known about how dementia shapes vulnerability to extreme temperatures. Methods We leveraged...

This study assesses the initial effects of the 2016 Brexit referendum on the mobility of academic scholars to and from the United Kingdom (UK). We leverage bibliometric data from millions of Scopus publications to infer changes in the countries of residence of published researchers by the changes in their institutional affiliations over time. We fo...

Migration scholars agree that migration is a highly gendered process. While the literature on this topic is increasing, the knowledge produced remains fragmentary and has not been synthesized systematically yet. This literature review aims at summarizing the current findings of quantitative migration research comparing migration patterns between ge...

Armed conflicts escalate combatant and civilian mortality and produce considerable levels of family bereavement. Yet, we know little about the prevalence of bereavement in conflict-affected populations. The violent loss of kin affects individuals across several dimensions, including trauma, mental health, socioeconomic status, and caregiving, espec...

A lack of comprehensive migration data is a major barrier for understanding the causes and consequences of migration processes, including for specific groups like high-skilled migrants. We leverage large-scale bibliometric data from Scopus and OpenAlex to trace the global movements of scholars. Based on our empirical validations, we develop pre-pro...

Undercounting is a critical issue in migration statistics, resulting in bias. This typically arises from insufficient reporting requirements and problems with enforcing such requirements. The main sources of information on undercounting are the metadata accompanying official statistics and expert opinions. However, metadata and arbitrary expert opi...

Digital trace data presents an opportunity for promptly monitoring shifts in migrant populations. This contribution aims to determine whether the number of European migrants in the United Kingdom (UK) declined between March 2019 and March 2020, using weekly estimates derived from the Facebook Advertising Platform. The collected data is disaggregate...

Although up-to-date information on the nature and extent of migration within the European Union (EU) is important for policymaking, timely and reliable statistics on the number of EU citizens residing in or moving across other member states are difficult to obtain. In this paper, we develop a statistical model that integrates data on EU migrant sto...

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the International Organization for Migration has postulated that international migrant stocks fell short of their pre-pandemic projections by nearly 2 million as a result of travel restrictions. However, this decline is not testable with migration data from traditional sources. Key migration stakeholders have c...

One of the strongest empirical regularities in spatial demography is that flows of migrants are positively associated with population stocks at origin and destination and are inversely related to distance. This pattern was formalized into what are known as gravity models of migration. Traditionally, distance is measured geographically, but other me...

Armed conflicts increase the mortality of combatants and civilians and each of these deaths implies the loss of a close relative for the surviving population. These experiences of loss have profound and durable impacts on the life of bereaved relatives. For instance, the violent death of a parent is likely to be traumatic and have adverse lingering...

Many people engage with a diverse array of social media platforms, raising concerns that this diversity of platforms may be linked to negative affect, hypothesized to arise from multitasking or identify diffusion. Using a large representative sample (N = 1,372) of US adults from the authoritative General Social Survey, we examine associations betwe...

As online social activities have become increasingly important for people's lives, understanding how migrants integrate into online spaces is crucial for providing a more complete picture of integration processes. We curate a high-quality data set to quantify patterns of new online social connections among immigrants in the United States. Specifica...

We provide the first systematic, large-scale exploration of user counts by age, gender, and location on Weibo, the world’s largest microblogging platform, using data from its advertising platform. Digital platforms potentially give access to information, economic opportunities, and social participation to underserved groups, and can be used for inf...

Extant literature has explored the social integration process of migrants settling in host communities. However, this literature typically takes a migrant-centric view, implicitly putting the burden of a successful integration on the migrant, and trying to identify the factors that lead to integration along various dimensions. In this paper, we fli...

Extant literature has explored the social integration process of migrants settling in host communities. However, this literature typically takes a migrant-centric view, implicitly putting the burden of a successful integration on the migrant, and trying to identify the factors that lead to integration along various dimensions. In this paper, we fli...

Migration and mobility present major societal challenges, while also representing key opportunities. New data sources from social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, offer valuable insights that can help us measure and understand patterns of long-term migration and short-term mobility, as well as migrant acculturation along various dimensions....

This chapter focuses on the potential value of data from two social media platforms: (a) geotagged tweets and (b) Facebook ads audience estimates – to demonstrate how these data can be used for migration statistics. The declared goal here is to enhance, not replace, traditional migration statistics. The chapter is divided into two main sections; th...

Although considerable progress toward gender equality in science has been made in recent decades, female researchers continue to face significant barriers in the academic labor market. International mobility has been increasingly recognized as a strategy for scientists to expand their professional networks, and that could help narrow the gender gap...

Situated at the intersection of the computational and demographic sciences, digital and computational demography explores how new digital data streams and computational methods advance the understanding of population dynamics, along with the impacts of digital technologies on population outcomes, e.g. linked to health, fertility and migration. Enco...

We leverage metadata on over 36 million journal articles and reviews indexed by Scopus in order to estimate migration of scholars based on information on changes in their institutional affiliations over time. We produce a database of yearly international migration flows of scholars, for all countries from 1998 to 2017. We use the open-access databa...

Obtaining reliable and timely estimates of migration flows is critical for advancing the migration theory and guiding policy decisions, but it remains a challenge. Digital data provide granular information on time and space, but do not draw from representative samples of the population, leading to biased estimates. We propose a method for combining...

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, travel restrictions implemented to prevent its spread, likethe suspension of international transit and closure of borders, first put into place in March 2020, oftensuddenly, have created complex, fast-evolving networks of restrictions between the countries of origin anddestination of migrants and would-be migra...

This study aims to evaluate the impact of demographic change on long-term, macro-level childcare and adult care transfers, accounting for the associated well-being effects of informal caregiving. We measure the impact of demographic change on non-monetary care exchanged between different groups by estimating matrices of time transfers by age and se...

Computational social science provides an innovative set of methodological tools that can help answer questions of substantive interest to migration and integration research. In this introductory article, we first provide a brief history of how computational approaches have already enriched migration and integration research. Second, we identify sev...

This study assesses the initial effects of the 2016 Brexit referendum on the mobility of academic scholars to and from the United Kingdom (UK). We leverage bibliometric data from millions of Scopus publications to infer changes in the countries of residence of published researchers by the changes in their institutional affiliations over time. We fo...

Migration and mobility present major societal challenges, while also representing key opportunities. New data sources from social media, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, offer valuable insights that can help us measure and understand patterns of long-term migration and short-term mobility, as well as immigrant integration along various dimensions. In...

Excess mortality associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has led many to experience the loss of family members, with significant negative outcomes. We quantify the extent to which these population-wide rates of kin loss represent a departure from levels expected in the absence of COVID-19 excess mortality and consider which demographic groups are mos...

Kinship relations play a crucial role in structuring populations and shaping individual outcomes. Differences in kinship among individuals, cohorts, and subpopulations are one important aspect of these structures. Demography and related disciplines have proposed sophisticated approaches to study kinship in recent years. We argue that the developmen...

Qualitative studies have found that the use of Information and Communication Technologies is related to an enhanced quality of life for older adults, as these technologies might act as a medium to access social capital regardless of geographical distance. In order to quantitatively study the association between older people’s characteristics and th...

Understanding the factors that explain why people move – or stay – and where they go, is a central goal of migration research. This article improves our understanding of migration aspirations of professionals in Europe by leveraging a previously untapped data source: aggregate-level information on LinkedIn users open to work-related international r...

The international migration of researchers is an important dimension of scientific mobility, and has been the subject of considerable policy debate. However, tracking the migration life courses of researchers is challenging due to data limitations. In this study, we use Scopus bibliometric data on eight million publications from 1.1 million researc...

Migration has been proposed as one of the factors that shape cultural similarities across countries. However, studying the relationship between culture and migration has been challenging, in part because culture is difficult to quantify. The traditionally used survey questionnaires have a number of drawbacks, including that they are costly and diff...

Measuring and forecasting migration patterns has important implications for understanding broader population trends, for designing policy effectively and for allocating resources. However, data on migration and mobility are often lacking, and those that do exist are not available in a timely manner. Social media data offer new opportunities to prov...

The international migration of researchers is an important dimension of scientific mobility, and has been the subject of considerable policy debate. However, tracking the migration life courses of researchers is challenging due to data limitations. In this study, we use Scopus bibliometric data on eight million publications from 1.1 million researc...

Objectives We investigate changes in social contact patterns following the gradual introduction of non-pharmaceutical interventions and their implications for infection transmission in the early phase of the pandemic. Design, setting and participants We conducted an online survey based on targeted Facebook advertising campaigns across eight countr...

Generational overlap affects the care time demands on parents and grandparents worldwide. Here, we present the first global estimates of the experience of simultaneously having frail older parents and young children (“sandwichness”) or young grandchildren (“grandsandwichness”) for the 1970–2040 cohorts, using demographic methods and microsimulation...

The death of a child affects the well-being of parents and families worldwide, but little is known about the scale of this phenomenon. Using a novel methodology from formal demography applied to data from the 2019 Revision of the United Nations World Population Prospects, we provide the first global overview of parental bereavement, its magnitude,...

Background: Physical distancing measures aim to reduce person-to-person contact, a key driver of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. In response to unprecedented restrictions on human contact during the COVID-19 pandemic, studies measured social contact patterns under the implementation of physical distancing measures. This rapid review synthesizes empirical...

Germany has become a major country of immigration, as well as a research powerhouse in Europe. As Germany spends a higher fraction of its GDP on research and development than most countries with advanced economies, there is an expectation that Germany should be able to attract and retain international scholars who have high citation performance. Us...

Germany has become a major country of immigration, as well as a research powerhouse in Europe. As Germany spends a higher fraction of its GDP on research and development than most countries with advanced economies, there is an expectation that Germany should be able to attract and retain international scholars who have high citation performance. Us...

Background We provide country-level estimates of the cumulative prevalence of mothers bereaved by a child’s death in 170 countries and territories. Methods We generate indicators of the cumulative prevalence of mothers who have had an infant, under-five-year-old or any-age child ever die by using publicly available survey data in 89 countries and...

Background In the absence of medical treatment and vaccination, individual behaviours are key to curbing the spread of COVID-19. Here we describe efforts to collect attitudinal and behavioural data and disseminate insights to increase situational awareness and inform interventions. Methods We developed a rapid data collection and monitoring system...

Non-pharmaceutical interventions have been implemented worldwide to curb the spread of COVID-19. However, the effectiveness of such governmental measures in reducing the mortality burden remains a key question of scientific interest and public debate. In this study, we leverage digital mobility data to assess the effects of reduced human mobility o...

An accurate estimation of international migration is hampered by a lack of timely and comprehensive data, and by the use of different definitions and measures of migration in different countries. In an effort to address this situation, we complement traditional data sources for the United Kingdom with social media data: our aim is to understand whe...

Background: Physical distancing measures aim to reduce person-to-person contact, a key driver of transmission of respiratory infections such as SARS-CoV-2. In response to unprecedented restrictions on human contact during the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of studies measured social contact patterns under the implementation of physical distancing meas...

Georeferenced digital trace data offer unprecedented flexibility in migration estimation. Because of their high temporal granularity, many migration estimates can be generated from the same data set by changing the definition parameters. Yet despite the growing application of digital trace data to migration research, strategies for taking advantage...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic poses the risk of overburdening health care systems, and in particular intensive care units (ICUs). Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), ranging from wearing masks to (partial) lockdowns have been implemented as mitigation measures around the globe. However, especially severe NPIs are used with great caution due...

Surveys of the general population can provide crucial information for designing effective nonpharmaceutical interventions to tackle public health emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, conducting such surveys can be difficult, especially when timely data collection is required. In this viewpoint paper, we discuss our experiences with usin...

The migration of scholars is a major driver of innovation and of diffusion of knowledge. Although large-scale bibliometric data have been used to measure international migration of scholars, our understanding of internal migration among researchers is very limited. This is partly due to a lack of data aggregated at a suitable sub-national level. In...

The article by Florianne C.J. Verkroost, Ridhi Kashyap, Kiran Garimella, Ingmar Weber and Emilio Zagheni analyses gender gaps in the IT industry based on data from the advertising platform of LinkedIn, which the authors use to estimate the supply side of these industries and identify gender gaps across countries. They disaggregate the IT industry i...

Following the outbreak of COVID-19, a number of non-pharmaceutical interventions have been implemented to contain the spread of the pandemic. Despite the recent reduction in the number of infections and deaths in Europe, it is still unclear to which extent these governmental actions have contained the spread of the disease and reduced mortality. In...

UNSTRUCTURED Surveys of the general population can provide crucial information for designing effective nonpharmaceutical interventions to tackle public health emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, conducting such surveys can be difficult, especially when timely data collection is required. In this viewpoint paper, we discuss our experien...

Physical distancing measures are intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. However, the impact these measures have on social contact and disease transmission patterns remains unclear. We ran the first comparative contact survey (N=53,708) across eight countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom, United States)...

Censuses around the world are key sources of data to guide government investments and public policies. However, these sources are very expensive to obtain and are collected relatively infrequently. Over the last decade, there has been growing interest in the use of data from social media to complement traditional data sources. However, social media...

In the absence of medical treatment and vaccination, the mitigation and containment of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic relies on behavioral changes. Timely data on attitudes and behaviors are thus necessary to develop optimal intervention strategies and to assess the consequences of the pandemic for different demographic groups. We developed a rapid...

Migration of scholars is a major driver of innovation and diffusion of knowledge. Although large-scale bibliometric data have been used to measure international migration of scholars, our understanding of internal migration among researchers is very limited. This is partly due to lack of data aggregated at a suitable sub-national level. In this stu...

Measuring and forecasting migration patterns, and how they change over time, has important implications for understanding broader population trends, for designing policy effectively and for allocating resources. However, data on migration and mobility are often lacking, and those that do exist are not available in a timely manner. Social media data...

Some 17.6 million EU citizens are currently living and working abroad, and 4% of the EU population of working age lives in another EU country. Having up-to-date information about the nature and extent of such mobility is important for policy making. However, timely and reliable statistics on the number of EU citizens residing in or moving across ot...

The workshop program of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s 13th International Conference on Web and Social Media was held at the Bavarian School of Public Policy in Munich, Germany on June 11, 2019. There were five full-day workshops, one half-day workshop, and the annual evening Science Slam in the program. The procee...

The policy debate around researchers' geographic mobility has been moving away from a theorized zero-sum game in which countries can be winners ("brain gain") or losers ("brain drain"), and toward the concept of "brain circulation," which implies that researchers move in and out of countries and everyone benefits. Quantifying trends in researchers'...

Recent population change has seen increases in life expectancy, reductions in family size, and postponement of fertility to older ages. We analyze the effect of these dynamics on the experience of child death over the life course for the 1950-1999 annual birth cohorts of women around the world. The paper draws on age-specific fertility and mortalit...

Migration has become a significant source of population change at the global level, with broad societal implications. Although understanding the drivers of migration is critical to enacting effective policies, theoretical advances in the study of migration processes have been limited by the lack of data on flows of migrants, or by the fragmented na...

The policy debate around researchers’ geographic mobility has been moving away from a theorized zero-sum game in which countries can be winners (“brain gain”) or losers (“brain drain”), and toward the concept of “brain circulation,” which implies that researchers move in and out of countries and everyone benefits. Quantifying trends in researchers’...