Demographic and Migration Modelling

The Demographic and Migration Modelling group is the hub of innovative methodological work on statistical and computational demography within the Department of Social Statistics and Demography. The group’s focus is on the methods for estimating and predicting fertility, mortality, and migration, and for assessing their uncertainty.  Much of the relevant research is carried out as a part of the modelling strand of the Centre for Population Change. Most recently, as part of the ESRC-funded Connecting Generations project, the group is employing its expertise in fertility and mortality projections to produce forecasts of kinship networks, which have important implications for informal social care policy and for understanding intergenerational transfers. 

In particular, over the past decade, the group has become a stronghold of novel quantitative research on migration processes, both statistical and computational, with projects including Integrated Modelling of European Migration, funded by NORFACE, Bayesian Agent-based Population Studies, funded by the European Research Council, a Horizon 2020 consortium QuantMig: Quantifying Migration Scenarios for Better Policy, led by our team, and more recently as part of the Horizon Europe FutuRes consortium. By proposing new, interdisciplinary methods for studying migration, we explicitly recognise the different types of uncertainty of the underpinning complex processes, and propose ways of managing them. 

The migration and demographic modelling work of the Social Statistics and Demography team is renowned for combining methodological innovation with in-depth knowledge of migration demographic processes and the underpinning data. At the same time, our research is very strongly policy-oriented: we have worked with a wide range of national and international organisations on different aspects of migration and population estimation and forecasting. Organisations the team have worked with include: the Office for National Statistics; the European Asylum Support Office (now the European Union Agency for Asylum); the Migration Advisory Committee; the Greater London Authority; the United Nations Refugee Agency; and the International Committee of the Red Cross. By maintaining stringent standards of methodological rigour, we aim to offer research of high societal relevance in the increasingly uncertain and complex worlds of demographic change and international migration.