This week in research #30

Last week I was at the 12th International Conference on Population Geographies at Queen's University in Belfast. Despite the name, this conference attracts a multi-disciplinary group of attendees across population geography, population economics, and sociology, among other fields. There were more sessions that I wanted to attend than I could possibly attend, but here are some of the highlights I found from the conference:

• My tong-term collaborator Jacques Poot presented on using spatial interaction models for forecasting inter-regional migration in Australia (related to work that Jacques and I have done for New Zealand, forthcoming in the journal Population Research and Policy Review)
• Tony Champion and Anne Green presented on an analysis of Graduate Outcomes Survey data from the UK, showing which regions gain and which lose migrants moving to and from university, which is also published in the journal Population, Space and Place (this would be interesting to look at for New Zealand as well)
• Erli Kang presented on the influence of the Hukou system on Chinese students returning from studying overseas (from which I learned that students who study abroad can claim Hukou status in Shanghai or other cities, if the university they studied in abroad has a high ranking, which neatly explains why international university rankings are so important for the Chinese student market)
• James O'Donnell presented counterfactual scenarios on how international migration affects regional populations and population ageing in Australia
• Nevena Trnavcevic presented on the challenges of ethnicity data in vital statistics in Serbia, where there are problems of inconsistency in recording ethnicity for many small ethnic groups (and ethnicity, multiple-ethnicity, and ethnic mobility were real themes across many sessions at the conference)
• Richard Wright gave an excellent keynote address on changes in racial-ethnic diversity in the US from 1990 to 2020 (with much of the data and results available online at https://www.mixedmetro.us/ (and again, this is something that could easily be replicated for New Zealand)

Aside from the conference, here's what caught my eye in research over the past week (a slow week, as I didn't have much time to keep up):

• Fenizia and Saggio find that city council dismissals in Italy increase employment, the number of firms, and industrial real estate prices, and the effects are concentrated in Mafia-dominated sectors and in municipalities where fewer incumbents are re-elected, suggesting that the dismissals generate large economic returns by weakening the Mafia and fostering trust in local institutions