January 09, 2015 | News

Congratulations!

On January 8, 2015, former MPIDR-researcher Felix Rößger has successfully defended his PhD thesis at the University of Rostock. In his dissertation, he focused on migration processes, taking a demographic perspective.

Birth and death change the size and composition of populations. And so do migration processes; yet they have received less attention by demographic research. In this context, migration is often regarded as the poor cousin of demography. In his dissertation, Felix Rößger has identified various reasons why. He has shown inter alia that migration aspects were already treated in a cursory manner in classical writings on demography.

In the empirical part of his dissertation, Felix Rößger for the first time ever provides age-specific migration rates for six different European countries during the period of mass migration from Europe, i.e., from the mid-19th to the early 20th century. He used these data to investigate the contribution of cohort size to the phenomenon of mass migration. His results disprove a popular hypothesis in migration research, according to which the large migration flows were caused primarily by an increase in the number of young people aged 15 to 30 as a result of demographic transition. This age group is known to be particularly prone to migration. Felix Rößger proved that hypothesis wrong: It was rather the relative cohort size that played a decisive role, i.e., the relative ratio of the age group particularly prone to migrate to the older adults. He found out that the larger the group of younger adults (ages 15-29) relative to the older adults (ages 30-49) was, the higher were the migration rates of the younger group.

Felix Rößger was a student at the MPIDR. He then attended the European Doctoral of Demography and moved on to work as a PhD student in the MPIDR’s Laboratory of Economic and Social Demography. Since March 2014, he has been working as research scientist in the Unit for Demographic Analyses and Methods at the Federal Statistical Office in Wiesbaden, Germany.