Video now available: 'An agent-based model of sex ratio at birth distortions' with Francisco Villavicencio

CPC recently welcomed Dr Francisco Villavicencio who gave a seminar on his model for explaining the sex distortion at birth in India and South Korea.

Francisco is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark. He has a background in Mathematics and Geography, and holds a PhD in Demography. His research interests include the development of methods to deal with sparse demographic data (Bayesian inference, agent-based modeling), mortality, and formal demography. In the last years he has been teaching several courses in R, statistics and mathematics at the University of Southern Denmark and at the European Doctoral School of Demography.

This seminar examines how, since the 1980s and 1990s, a decline in total fertility levels across a number of countries in Asia and the Caucasus has been accompanied by an unprecedented rise in the proportion of male births compared to female births, usually expressed in terms of the sex ratio at birth (SRB). Although the micro-level factors - persistent son preference within a context of fertility decline and growing access to pre-natal sex determination technology - are known, their specific levels, trends and interactions in explaining macro-level SRB trajectories are hard to discern with existing data and approaches. We present an agent-based model (ABM) that examines the contribution of each of these micro-level factors to the emergence of distorted SRBs at the macro-level, and calibrate the model to the South Korean and Indian scenarios.

A video of the seminar is available on the CPC YouTube channel:



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Posted 22/03/2018 10:46