Scientific Presentations
LabTalks@KinshipInequalities
Research Group: Kinship Inequalities
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, May 27, 2026
11:00 AM: Talk with Amilcar Matos-Moreno - A Demographic Crisis in Slow Motion: Migration, Kinship Erosion, and Transnational Network Structure Among Older Puerto Ricans
room 400
Abstract
Puerto Rico offers one of the starkest natural experiments in contemporary demography: a high-outmigration society aging at an exceptional pace, with no immigration buffer and a persistent fertility decline. This talk traces a decade of research examining how these macro-demographic forces restructure the social worlds of older adults left behind. I begin with demographic decomposition analysis showing that migration is the primary driver of Puerto Rico's rapid population aging, situating the island within a broader class of migration-sending societies facing compounding demographic pressures. I then present results from matrix kinship models estimated using two-sex, time-variant population projection methods applied to UN World Population Prospect 2024 data, demonstrating how sustained outmigration systematically depletes kin availability across the lifecourse and reduces the structural potential for informal caregiving in older cohorts. Finally, I draw on ego-network data from the Puerto Rican Elderly: Health Conditions (PREHCO) study to examine how the resulting transnational network structures; operationalized through compositional and topological network measures; relate to self-rated health and depressive symptomatology among adults aged 60 and older. Ego-network analysis combined with logistic and negative binomial regression models reveals divergent associations depending on health outcome: transnational network composition predicts depressive symptoms but shows a weaker direct association with self-rated health, suggesting that the functional and emotional dimensions of social connectedness respond differently to geographic fragmentation. Taken together, this body of work advances a multi-level framework linking population-level demographic processes to the meso-scale network environments that shape health in later life, with implications for aging societies across the Caribbean and beyond.
About
Dr. Amílcar Matos-Moreno is a demographer and social epidemiologist whose work examines the demographic consequences of migration for aging societies, with a focus on kinship structures, personal network analysis, and health outcomes among older adults in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. He holds a dual appointment as Assistant Research Professor at the Center for Healthy Aging at Penn State University and as Associate Professor at Carlos Albizu University in Puerto Rico. His research is supported by a Career Development Award (K01AG083333) from the National Institute on Aging, through which he leads the Puerto Rican Aging and Transnational Networks (PRATN) Study; a pilot study combining ego-network methods with population-level demographic modeling to examine how transnational network structures shape health in later life. His work integrates matrix kinship modeling, demographic decomposition, and social network analysis to link macro-level population processes to the meso-scale social environments of older adults. He is a collaborator on the PREHCO (Puerto Rican Elderly: Health Conditions) dataset and maintains active research partnerships at Penn State's Department of Sociology and Criminology. His research has been published in Population Research and Policy Review and The Gerontologist, and has been covered by The Washington Post and NBC News.
Register to Take Part
You would like to attend the Online Seminar Talk? You are very welcome. Please register by writing an e-mail to office-zagheni@demogr.mpg.de.
Online Seminar Talk, May, 27th from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (Rostock time)