Scientific Presentations

LabTalks­@DCD

Department of Digital and Computational Demography
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, November 19, 2025

11:00 AM: Talk with Yuyao Liu - Cool Head Under Crisis? The Relationships Among Migration, Public Concern, Reported Information, and Government Action

Room 400

Abstract

COVID-19 caused unprecedented disruptions to international migration, yet the speed, duration, and mechanisms by which migration flows responded to this crisis and its related information and policies remain unclear. This study addresses this gap by analyzing monthly international movements estimated based on de-identified Facebook user records, covering 35 countries accommodating over 73% of the world’s international migrants. Using a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model, we examined the dynamic interplay between migration flows, government policies, pandemic severity, and public attention. We revealed that the changes in long-term immigration are largely unaffected by governmental controls or the COVID-19 cases and deaths, highlighting the enduring structural forces behind immigration even during the global crisis. Public attention on the pandemic, rather than objective health data (i.e., reported infection or mortality), emerges as the key driver of long-term emigration, indicating the role of perceived risks and active concerns in shaping emigration decisions. We also identify a bidirectional causality between government responses and public attention, emphasizing the importance of adaptive, transparent policymaking to maintain public trust during crises. This study enhances understanding of how migration responds to real-time information and policy shifts during the crisis, offering novel insights for migration management in an increasingly interconnected and information-driven world.

About

Yuyao Liu is a visiting student from the University of Hong Kong where she is a third-year PhD student at the Department of Sociology.  Her research interests are international migration, behavior sciences, and labor mobility. Her PhD research focuses on subjective integration and attitudes of immigrants.