I am a statistical demographer working predominantly with migration data to better predict past and future movement patterns and gain a richer understanding of how migration varies by core demographic variables such as age, sex, and education. This website contains posts mainly related to my research, including some information on my publications and use of R, including packages I developed.
I am based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. Previously, I have worked in the Asian Demographic Research Institute at Shanghai University, the Vienna Institute of Demography in the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the ESRC Centre for Population Change and S3RI at the University of Southampton.
PhD Social Statistics and Demography, 2009
University of Southampton
MSc Social Statistics (Distinction), 2005
University of Southampton
MSc Statistics (Distinction), 2003
University of Kent
Data on stocks and flows of international migration are necessary to understand migrant patterns and trends and to monitor and evaluate migration-relevant international development agendas. Many countries do not publish data on bilateral migration flows. At least six methods have been proposed recently to estimate bilateral migration flows between all origin-destination country pairs based on migrant stock data published by the World Bank and United Nations. We apply each of these methods to the latest available stock data to provide six estimates of five-year bilateral migration flows between 1990 and 2015. To assess the resulting estimates, we correlate estimates of six migration measures from each method with equivalent reported data where possible. Such systematic efforts at validation have largely been neglected thus far. We show that the correlation between the reported data and the estimates varies widely among different migration measures, over space, and over time. We find that the two methods using a closed demographic accounting approach perform consistently better than the four other estimation approaches.
Click on the hex sticker to visit pkgdown sites.